Nick Clegg languages spoken, written or signed Dutch
Early life and family
Clegg was born in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, the third of four children of Hermance van den Wall Bake and Nicholas Peter Clegg, chairman of United Trust Bank and a former trustee of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation (where Ken Clarke was an adviser).Clegg has one-quarter Baltic-German ancestry. His paternal grandmother, Baroness Kira von Engelhardt, of Smolensk, was a Baltic-German noblewoman, niece of Moura Budberg, adventuress and suspected double agent, and the granddaughter of attorney general of the Imperial Russian Senate, Ignatiy Platonovich Zakrevsky. Through this Russian connection, Clegg is distantly related to Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2008 to 2011.His English grandfather was Hugh Anthony Clegg, editor of the British Medical Journal for 35 years.Clegg's mother is Dutch and was interned, along with her family, by the Japanese military in Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) during the Second World War. She met Clegg's father during a visit to England in 1956, and they married on 1 August 1959.
Clegg is multilingual. He speaks English, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish. His background has informed his politics. He says, "There is simply not a shred of racism in me, as a person whose whole family is formed by flight from persecution, from different people in different generations. It's what I am. It's one of the reasons I am a liberal." His Dutch mother instilled in him "a degree of scepticism about the entrenched class configurations in British society".
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