BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Nick Clegg is new Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is new Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg with wife Miriam after the announcement The announcement Nick Clegg has won the race to become the next Liberal Democrat leader. The 40-year-old beat Chris Huhne to become the party's third leader in two years - in a contest which turned out to be even closer than expected. Mr Clegg, an ex-journalist and former Euro MP, won 20,988 votes to the 20,477 votes cast for Mr Huhne by members. In his acceptance speech Mr Clegg said he wanted his leadership to be about "ambition and change", saying "we want to change politics and change Britain". The Sheffield Hallam MP said he wanted to mark the "beginning of Britain's liberal future". Mr Clegg, speaking after the announcement at a central London hotel, acknowledged it had been a "close fought contest" and praised his rival, who he said he was looking forward to working with. He said he wanted to attract those voters who shared liberal values, but did not currently vote for the party.

I want the Liberal Democrats to be the future of politics Nick Clegg Clegg speech in full He thanked Vincent Cable for a "spellbinding" performance as acting leader - and praised his predecessor Sir Menzies Campbell, whose resignation in October sparked the leadership race. Mr Clegg, who has two children with wife Miriam, a Spanish lawyer, said that without Sir Menzies, the party would not have the "bright future" it now faced. He said Labour and the Conservatives were "mutating" into each other, and urged disaffected voters to join the Lib Dems, saying he wanted to "provide a liberal alternative to the discredited politics of big government". Public meetings He pledged to spend at least a day a week campaigning outside Westminster, and to hold regular public town hall meetings to give people who were not Lib Dem members, but supported the party, a chance to have their say. He accused the Conservatives of having "no answers to the big issues" and said Labour was "increasingly exhausted and discredited" - saying it left an opportunity for the Lib Dems.

You win some you lose some, it was a close-run thing Chris Huhne Huhne hails Clegg "I want the Liberal Democrats to be the future of politics, because Liberal Democrats have the courage to imagine a better society to break the stifling grip of the two party system for good. "To bring in a new politics, of politicians who listen to people, not themselves. No more business as usual. No more government knows best. "I want today to mark the beginning of a real change in Britain. The beginning of Britain's Liberal future." Third leader Mr Huhne thanked everyone involved in his campaign and said he looked forward to working with Mr Clegg - whom he praised for his warmth, intelligence and energy.

Clegg, together with Huhne and Cable, could make an effective team BBC political editor Nick Robinson Read Nick's thoughts in full He told the BBC: "I have been around the course long enough that I know what the rules of the game are - you win some you lose some, it was a close-run thing." He said there was inevitably an "in-built abrasiveness" to leadership contests, but said the contest had got the party's message across and he was sure he and Mr Clegg would go on working well together. Mr Clegg is the party's third leader in two years - Charles Kennedy quit in January 2006, forced out by a frontbench rebellion after admitting a drink problem. Sir Menzies resigned in October, blaming an age-obsessed media. The strange death of Liberal Democrat Britain? – Channel 4 News Share on Twitter It seems a lifetime ago. In the last few weeks of the 2010 election campaign, the Liberal Democrats managed to out-poll Labour on several occasions, achieving a rating of 34 per cent in one YouGov survey, putting them ahead of Labour and the Conservatives .

This was at the height of “Cleggmania”, when leader Nick Clegg rose to prominence after impressing in the party leaders’ televised debates. The now deputy prime minister won plaudits for his performances and was riding high in the polls, with better showings than David Cameron and Gordon Brown . YouGov polling for the Sunday Times found that he was viewed as the most impressive, honest and charismatic of the three and the strongest leader. With it looking as though no single party would win an overall majority, 53 per cent said a hung parliament with the Lib Dems holding the balance of power could be a good thing (37 per cent disagreed). The campaign could not have gone better for Mr Clegg and his party, but reality dawned as soon as the results were counted. There was no breakthrough: they had won 57 seats and 23 per cent of the popular vote (compared with 62 seats and 23 per cent in 2005, when Charles Kennedy was leading the party). Despite this, David Cameron’s Conservatives failed to win a majority and he turned to Mr Clegg for support – with Britain entering the unfamililar territory of coalition, two-party government.

Falling poll ratings Back then, the Lib Dems were polling 21 per cent in YouGov surveys , but by November 2010 this had fallen to 9 per cent and has not risen above 13 per cent since then. The party’s ratings are often in single figures, consistently behind Ukip since August 2013. Now “the pollster’s pollster” Bob Worcester is predicting they’ll only win 24 seats at the 2015 election. Some Lib Dem voters will never forgive the party for forging a coalition with the Tories. Others who abandoned Labour for the Lib Dems – in protest at the Iraq war and tuition fees – are unlikely to do so again. Then there is the issue of political identification, with Lib Dem voters far less likely to say they identify with their party than Labour and Conservative supporters. This is because the Lib Dems tend to benefit from protest and tactical votes. Anthony Wells , associate director of political and social research at YouGov , told Channel 4 News the Lib Dems had “lost several of their previous USPs”.

They used to be “an alternative anti-Conservative vote” for people who did not like Labour, but after being in coalition with the Tories, they had lost the “anti-Tory vote”. He added: “They also used to benefit from a ‘plague on both your houses’ protest vote. They were the natural party for people who just wanted change from the current establishment. Again, being part of government makes it difficult to appeal in that way, so they’ve lost the anti-establishment vote.” Mr Wells described Mr Clegg’s ratings as “dire”. So what has gone wrong for the Lib Dems and their leader since 2010? Tuition fees Mr Clegg’s first big test was university tuition fees , introduced by the previous Labour government. During the election campaign, he said his party would vote against any increase, winning support from students in the process. But he ended up supporting the coalition’s decision to raise fees from £3,300 to £9,000 a year. All very embarrassing for Mr Clegg, who apologised in a party political broadcast and admitted that the Lib Dems had been wrong to make the pledge.

This broadcast was remixed by a music producer and became a hit on YouTube, with Mr Clegg’s words turned into song. The effect was to gently poke fun at Mr Clegg’s apology, but the Lib Dem leader took it in good grace, allowing the producer to turn it into a single to raise money for charity. Chris Huhne Worse was to come in May 2011, when the then energy secretary Chris Huhne – who stood against Mr Clegg for the Lib Dem leadership in 2007 – was accused of dodging a driving ban by asking his then wife, Vicky Pryce, to accept his penalty points for speeding. He resigned his cabinet post when he was charged in February 2012, but continued to deny the allegations until the first day of his trial a year later, when he admitted perverting the course of justice and said he was resigning as an MP. A month earlier, Mr Clegg had said he hoped Mr Huhne would return to the “top table” of British politics if he was cleared of the charges against him. The episode, which culminated in Mr Huhne and Ms Pryce being jailed , was another testing time for the Lib Dem leader.

But the end result could have been worse: the Lib Dems managed to hold on to Mr Huhne’s Eastleigh seat in a by-election. Lord Rennard The Lord Rennard affair has been covered in depth on this website, so a brief resume will have to do on this occasion. Seven months later, the police announced there was insufficient evidence to support a prosecution . In January 2014, a report for the Lib Dems by Alistair Webster QC found that the evidence against Lord Rennard was not sufficient to meet the burden of proof required by the party’s disciplinary procedures, but he advised the peer to apologise to the women involved for violating their “personal space”. Lord Rennard has refused to do so for legal reasons . He continues to deny the allegations and was ready to take his seat in the Lords on Monday when it was announced that he had been suspended from the party while a new investigation begins into whether his failure to apologise has brought the party into disrepute. This decision was taken by a Lib Dem committee which oversees disciplinary procedures, not Mr Clegg, and the peer is now considering taking legal action against the party.

Asked why he had failed to extract an apology from Lord Rennard, Mr Clegg said: “I don’t think it is my job as leader of the party to try to micro-manage this …. I can’t frogmarch someone to apologise.” Whether this long-running saga has any effect on Lib Dem hopes in 2015 remains to be seen, but it is clearly a test of Mr Clegg’s leadership, even if internal party rules make it difficult for him to bring it to a swift end. In February 2013, after Channel 4 News had first broadcast the allegations, YouGov polling for the Sun showed that Mr Clegg had his work cut out. Asked if Mr Clegg had been open and honest about way he handled allegations, 11 per cent of respondents said yes and 52 per cent no. Some 28 per cent said the way the party had dealt with the issue made them view the Lib Dems more negatively; 2 per cent more positively. Anthony Wells told Channel 4 News: “What makes me worry a bit more is that it’s not going away.

Generally speaking this should be a Westminster bubble story – it’s about a disciplinary procedure against a backroom figure most of the public have never heard of. “In normal terms it should be the sort of thing that only the most politically minded notice and which is rapidly forgotten by next week. By not dealing with it cleanly it becomes a bigger story, sticks around longer, and stands more chance of being noticed by floating voters.” With an election in 2015 and his party languishing in the polls, Mr Clegg will be hoping a solution is found soon. Achievements in government There is a debate over how much the Lib Dems have achieved in government and to what extent, as junior partners, they have been forced to accept Conservative policies many party activists find hard to stomach. The leadership claims credit for lifting 2.7 million of the poorest workers out of income tax, taking action on poverty through the pupil premium, providing the poorest young children with free school meal and childcare, and raising the state pension.

In September 2013, YouGov polling for the Sun found that voters were not convinced the Lib Dems had achieved much, while trust in the party had fallen and Nick Clegg was considered indecisive by 55 per cent (decisive 18 per cent) and weak by 75 per cent (strong 11 per cent). But if the Lib Dems are having no effect on coalition policy, why are the newspapers full of Conservative MPs bemoaning their influence and urging David Cameron to get a grip and return to the true Conservative path? The problem for Mr Clegg is that he has a lot of convincing to do, but is running out of time. Having to contend with long-running internal issues is not helping. Then there is the fact that his greatest hope of making the Lib Dems a power to be reckoned with was a change to a more proportional voting system. A referendum was agreed between the Lib Dems and Conservatives as part of the coalition deal after the election, but the voters overwhelmingly rejected replacing first past the post with the alternative vote in 2011.

The Clegg catastrophe | Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt | Politics | The Guardian Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt Wednesday 24 June 2015 16.09 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 09.31 EDT Share on Messenger Close On Thursday 17 April 2014, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott, an old personal friend of the business secretary Vince Cable, sent an email to Cable’s wife, Rachel. It contained the results of a private poll, commissioned by Oakeshott from the respected polling firm ICM, of six Lib Dem seats. It showed that Cable was already trailing in his Twickenham constituency. Oakeshott followed up the email with a text to Cable himself, stressing that his secretary’s discretion could be relied upon and explaining that Cable’s special adviser had “asked me to forward the poll to your wife”. Oakeshott signed off his text: “Happy to discuss on mob now, or we are back home tea time Sunday.” Nick Clegg: early resignation would not have prevented general election disaster Read more The timing of the poll, and the surrounding secrecy, was not a coincidence.

Oakeshott, a stalwart of the party’s social democratic left wing and a vocal critic of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s economic policies, had long been a political opponent of Nick Clegg . The Liberal Democrat leader was on the brink of an expected disaster in local and European elections the following month – the voters’ roar of disapproval at his decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives. Oakeshott regarded the forthcoming electoral drubbing as the last chance to remove Clegg, whom he had long seen as a political disaster for the party. “It felt like the scene in Far from the Madding Crowd when the sheep charge over the hill together,” Oakeshott recalled. “I thought ‘Oh my God, this is it’. In the face of all available evidence – in council elections, byelections and opinion polls – there was collective self-delusion, and the party was going to press ahead to disaster.” So the poll of Twickenham and five other seats – including Clegg’s constituency of Sheffield Hallam – was designed to map the scale of the defeat and shock the party into deposing Clegg, in order to avert an even more devastating wipeout at the next general election.

Cable has always been vague about his precise knowledge of Oakeshott’s polls ; he insisted at the time that he knew only about the polling in his own constituency. But it is now clear that Oakeshott briefed him not only on the poll results, but also on the coup being quietly plotted by John Pugh, the party’s MP for Southport, who was gathering names of MPs to join him in calling for Clegg’s resignation. Membership Event: The Fight for Liberal Britain, with Tim Farron and Norman Lamb “I had no animosity to Nick,” Pugh recalled. “But the party could not hinge on the fortunes of one man. We could not let liberalism disappear off the map just because we were afraid to take a tough decision about leadership. I approached colleagues and set some benchmarks – if we fell below three MEPs and lost more than 500 seats in locals, then we would have to act.” The party went on to lose 10 of its 11 European parliament seats, and 310 councillors. “There were a dozen MPs with serious misgivings,” Pugh said. “I spoke to Vince because MPs wanted to know, if Nick were to step down, would Vince step up?

One MP’s only question to me was, ‘Will Vince do it ?’ Answer, ‘Yes’. ‘Oh, right, I am for it’.” At around the same time, Pugh spoke to Naomi Smith, the chair of the Social Liberal Forum, which represents the party’s left wing. Smith, a Londoner, was hastily arranging a series of key constituency meetings to discuss the leadership question – as was Cable’s special adviser, Ashley Lumsden. As many as 500 party members signed an open letter, many more than Smith had expected, though she was not the prime mover behind the letter. A broad timetable for the rebellion was set. On 24 May, two days after the local elections, Pugh and Adrian Sanders, the Lib Dem MP for Torbay, duly called for Clegg to step aside. Pugh expected that other voices would follow.

“To my astonishment,” he recalled, “some of the very people who had said to me, ‘Yes, we have got to do something,’ then said diametrically the opposite.” By 26 May, Oakeshott became nervous that MPs were not rallying as planned – and in a bid to restore momentum to the rebellion, decided to publicise his polling on the dire fate awaiting the party at the general election. He handed the details to the Guardian, but insisted that his involvement in commissioning the polls not be revealed. Oakeshott tried to ring Cable, who was in China on a ministerial visit, to tell him what was afoot – but they missed each other by a matter of minutes. Pugh, meanwhile, was alarmed by Oakeshott’s leaking of the polls; he feared it was premature, and that it would look devious. Pugh worried – correctly – that the story would quickly shift from Clegg’s failure in the European and local elections to one focused on unmasking the identity of the mystery pollster. Pinterest Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck At this point Stephen Lotinga, the newly installed Lib Dem communications chief, decided to try to flush Cable out.

Without consulting Clegg, Lotinga telephoned Cable’s team in China and confronted them with an ultimatum: “Either you distance yourself from this, or you and Oakeshott are going to be named in tomorrow’s papers as the people behind it.” Lotinga now admits that he was bluffing. He had no definitive evidence that Oakeshott was involved. But Cable was disoriented, and started to get cold feet – he had already been uncomfortable with the prospect of being handed the leadership on a plate after Clegg was forced out. His wife, who was travelling with him in China, was unhappy that he had let himself become embroiled in the coup attempt to begin with. Within a few hours, Cable told the BBC that Oakeshott’s activities were reprehensible, and i nsisted publicly that there was no leadership issue in the party . The lesson, Lotinga said, was: “Never go to China if you want to mount a coup.” Cable was completely cut off. “If you go as a government minister, they take your phone off you.

He could not phone the people he needed to find out what was going on, and he was entirely reliant on us to be told what was happening back in Britain. He panicked.” Oakeshott resigned from the party after declaring that his only purpose had been to present evidence of the urgency of a leadership change. But the grassroots rebellion sputtered out without Cable’s support, and Pugh’s dozen rebels disappeared into the night. Clegg commissioned an official review of the election defeats, but little changed in the aftermath. Nick Clegg offered to resign as Lib Dem leader a year before 2015 election Read more The party’s result at the general election one year later was even worse than the rebels had feared: the party lost 49 of the 57 seats it had won in 2010, and its vote share plummeted by nearly two-thirds. The party had not been in such bad shape since the 1960s. In retrospect, it is easy to argue that the party needed to be warned of the scale of the approaching catastrophe. But the defeat is not easily explained away. How did an intellectually vibrant centrist party that was on course to become a permanent feature of a new British coalition politics fail so totally?

Inside the crippled party, everyone is now asking the questions that were avoided at the time of the failed coup. They are attempting to determine whether the brutal result was caused by individual mistakes, fear of a Labour-SNP coalition, or a fundamental misjudgment in the party’s decision to enter government with the Conservatives in 2010. * * * Though there can be no doubt that the party was badly damaged by Clegg’s decision to join the Tories in government, the seeds of the Lib Dems’ eventual electoral collapse may have been sown before the coalition was formed. On the one issue that damaged the party more than any other – its high-profile U-turn in favour of increasing tuition fees – the ground had already been prepared. After he became leader in December 2007, Clegg had begun to shift the party away from the social democratic populism that had defined it throughout the 2000s. Clegg and a circle of like-minded MPs, including Chris Huhne, David Laws and Vince Cable, wanted to move the Lib Dems towards the centre ground.

The founding document of this group was the Orange Book , a collection of essays published in 2004, which argued that the party needed to find market-friendly solutions to policy problems. By the time of the 2010 general election, Clegg’s Orange Book revolution was still incomplete: on a number of issues, the party was caught in an ideological no-man’s land, with a considerable divergence in views between its old social democratic wing and its centrist faction. The Liberal Democrats had opposed Tony Blair’s controversial decision to introduce tuition fees in 1997 – and fees soon became one of the party’s signal issues. But in the wake of the financial crisis, as public finances tightened, the Cleggites became increasingly concerned about the party’s stance. In December 2008, Julian Astle, who was director of the party’s thinktank Centre Forum , made the first attempt to shift the debate. “The Liberal Democrat policy on fees is regressive and ineffective,” he wrote, in a paper entitled “ Time’s Up ”.

The Lib Dem universities spokesman, Stephen Williams, also believed the abolition of tuition fees was an expensive albatross: with support from Clegg, Williams tried three times to shelve the policy, and met sharp resistance inside the party. One MP, David Howarth, threatened to stand down and force a byelection for his Cambridge seat if the party reversed course. Pinterest David Cameron and Nick Clegg hold their first joint press conference in the rose garden of Number 10 Downing Street in 2010. Photograph: Charlie Bibby But Clegg believed a moment of reckoning was imminent. A major review of university funding, initiated by the Labour government and chaired by the former BP CEO Lord Browne, was to be published in October 2010, and it was widely expected that the report would recommend abolishing the £3,000 annual tuition fee cap. Before the 2010 election, however, Clegg did not feel strongly enough to challenge the party’s commitment to free education – and he backed away from a battle over the issue at the 2009 Lib Dem conference. “There are only so many fights you can have before an election,” one of his aides recalled.

But few expected the party would be forced to confront the matter so soon. “We probably did not think in 2009 that we were going to be in government from 2010,” the former party spokeswoman Baroness Grender said. The party, desperate for votes, then fell into a trap set by the National Union of Students. In November 2009, the NUS persuaded 400 Liberal Democrat candidates, including Clegg, to sign a pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative. To make matters worse, Clegg agreed to be filmed doing so. Aaron Porter, then the NUS president, recalls that the directive for party members to sign the pledge came from the Lib Dems’ campaign department rather than the party leadership. “It was very easy to get them to do it,” he said. Still, in the party’s 2010 manifesto, Clegg tried to create some wiggle room – keeping the commitment to abolish fees, but pledging to phase them out over six years.

However, after the general election, when Clegg’s team began negotiating with the Conservatives on the terms of a coalition, the tuition fee promise was quickly jettisoned. Over the summer of 2010, the view that the party had betrayed voters by abandoning one of its core promises began to take hold. “Clegg had to have a position [on the tuition fees U-turn], but in the summer, as the narrative of betrayal built up, he was very vague about what he wanted,” said one of Clegg’s aides. “It was quite chaotic in those early days. He talked about a graduate tax, but no one believed a graduate tax would work. We spent hours discussing the presentation, probably more than the policy.” Many senior figures – including Clegg’s new press secretary James McGrory, Jonny Oates, the chief of staff, and David Laws, the former Treasury chief secretary – warned that supporting a rise in tuition fees would be disastrous. As business secretary, Cable looked for a way out; Danny Alexander, who had taken over from Laws as chief secretary to the Treasury, insisted the party should go along with the rise in tuition fees.

Alexander, who participated – alongside Clegg, Cameron, and Osborne – in the “quad” meetings where coalition policy was hammered out, was less interested in the politics of the issue than the economic impact; he believed it was a necessary step to reduce the deficit. Far from being abolished over six years, as the Lib Dem manifesto had promised, fees were to treble over two years. Cable made numerous adjustments to the policy to make it less regressive, but by November he knew what had been spawned – on another trade mission to China, he watched on television as protesting students tried to trash the Conservative headquarters. In December, on the eve of the Commons vote to raise fees, Martin Shapland, the chairman of Liberal Youth , went to see the chief whip Alistair Carmichael to make a final attempt to persuade the party to change course. “I told him the damage was going to be permanent and he disagreed,” Shapland said. “I even put a wager on it. At the time we, as a party, were identified with two issues: anti-war and anti-fees. What we did was equivalent to Labour coming out against social justice.

The problem was at the time there was nothing but bravado about owning coalition policies.” Aaron Porter tried to persuade the former party leader Charles Kennedy, one of the 21 Lib Dem MPs to vote against the fees rise, to say more in public. An apologetic Kennedy assured Porter that he would have his fights, but not so early in the parliament. Ahead of the debate, he took Porter up to the Commons gallery, and told him: “From here you can stare into Cable’s eyeballs as he sells out the party’s principles.” From here you can stare into Cable’s eyeballs as he sells out the party’s principles Charles Kennedy Baroness Williams, one of the original members of the “Gang of Four” who split from the Labour party to form the Social Democratic party in 1981, agrees that the fees decision cost the party dearly. “I just think we did not reckon with how deep the issue was, or how deep it would become,” she said. “It was a big mistake.” Williams believes the party made similar errors in dealing with the unpopular NHS reforms spearheaded by the Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley – a set of proposals the scale of which appeared to have crept up on the cabinet unawares.

Initially Clegg defended them: in an interview with Andrew Marr in January 2011, he called the reforms “a fusion of the best thinking of the Lib Dems and the Tories”. But within two months, Clegg was facing new protests from his MPs, as figures such as John Pugh brought deputations of senior doctors from the Royal Colleges to brief Clegg on the damage they believed Lansley’s reforms would cause. It took Williams, who had previously been one of Clegg’s loyal supporters, to force him into retreat at the party’s spring 2011 conference in Sheffield. Facing the prospect of a wider revolt, Cameron and Clegg announced a “pause” in the NHS reforms: the bill did not reach the Lords until October 2011, and it only passed into law the following year after numerous changes engineered by Williams and like-minded peers. “At the time, the Lib Dem party did not have anyone who was a great expert on health,” Williams recalled, describing her intervention. “Lansley is very much like a civil servant in many ways. He is very focused and hardly talks to anyone else – a lone man, a bit like Edward Heath in that sense.

He had this fixed idea that all you needed to do was change the structure of the NHS and give commissioning powers to GPs. He is a decent man but fundamentally quite obsessive. So I went to Nick and said, ‘We are not having it’. Nick has never been very good at consulting more experienced members of his party or people who have actually been in government, such as David Steel. He did not fully realise the significance of what was being proposed, and he did not have that much time. It was only when he realised he could not carry his conference that he started to listen to me.” According to Williams, Clegg apologised for having not studied Lansley’s proposal more rigorously. “He said to me, ‘I got the issue wrong – I had not had time to read it, and I should not have allowed it into the Commons without more scrutiny.’ In all fairness, he is in many ways a gallant noble man, very reasonable and thoughtful. One time he called me over to his offices in the pouring rain at short notice, and he was at the top of stairs with a towel waiting for me.” Nonetheless, Williams believes Clegg made one more major error – eagerly joining the relentless Tory assault on Labour’s economic record.

“I think the constant attack on Gordon Brown as being responsible for the banking crisis was terribly unfair and untrue,” she said. “We should not have taken part in it, but in fact we took part in it enthusiastically.” Pinterest Protesters scuffle with police during a student rally in central London, in 2012, against rises in university tuition fees. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images Cable was similarly troubled by the Lib Dems’ refusal to challenge the Tories’ economic narrative; he seriously considered resigning from his post as business secretary in 2012 in protest against Cameron and Osborne’s spending cuts. Although his critics say Cable is too academic and too ill-disciplined for the cut and thrust of modern politics, throughout his time in government he remained an irritation to his coalition partners. (His close relationship with Oakeshott particularly infuriated the Tories, and once prompted Cameron to offer to take Oakeshott with him on a trip to Moscow to act as his food taster.) After wrestling with his decision, Cable decided to remain, in part because he loved his department and wanted to protect it from cuts.

Cable also believed that Osborne was heeding his calls to slow the pace of cuts – even if Osborne would not publicly admit that he had changed course. But the early combination of the tuition fee hike, the unpopular NHS reforms, and the continuing economic slowdown all took a toll on the party. At one point, Clegg admitted to his aides: “I am not really leading.” Within three months of forming the coalition, the Lib Dems’ popularity had fallen off a cliff – from 23 points to 13 points. Clegg’s personal ratings were even worse: in the summer of 2012, one YouGov poll found his approval rating had sunk to minus 59. Those closest to Clegg insisted there was no going back. Richard Reeves, his influential strategy adviser in the first two years of the coalition, was the most adamant. “There is a new political market for the Liberal Democrats,” he wrote in the New Statesman in September 2012 . “The party just needs to seek it out rather than looking wistfully at the old customers who have turned away. The leftwing votes borrowed from Labour in 2010 will not be available in 2015.

New ones must be found.” That same month, in a bid to set the party back on course, Clegg launched what later became known as his “masochism strategy” – a nod to the phrase Tony Blair used to describe his own encounters with angry voters around the time of the Iraq war in 2003. Phase one was a party political broadcast a week before the Lib Dem conference in Brighton, in which Clegg declared: “There is no easy way to say this. We made a pledge, we did not stick to it, and for that I am sorry.” Baroness Grender, Clegg’s communications adviser at the time, admitted that the apology did not work – but she believes that it was worth trying. “There was very little advice against it,” she said recently. “The risk was that it achieved nothing and simply raised the issue again – and in a way that confirmed betrayal as the standard narrative. But I think tuition fees became the mantra you can deploy for a feeling you cannot explain to yourself.

If it had not been tuition fees, it would have been health or the bedroom tax – it was driven by a general dislike of politicians, a general disbelief in politicians sticking to their word, and the way in which the smaller partner in a coalition always gets a kicking.” * * * In early 2013, Clegg received another warning of the Lib Dems’ electoral vulnerability. In February, Chris Huhne, one of the party’s big hitters, resigned as MP for Eastleigh after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice 10 years earlier over a speeding offence. Huhne’s resignation led to a snap byelection in his Hampshire seat, which was regarded as one of the party’s safest. In the end, the Lib Dem candidate Mike Thornton only just managed to win the seat. “It was a complete fluke the way it turned out,” recalled Lord Oakeshott, who warned at the time that the byelection showed the party was in mortal danger. “It was our best-organised seat and it just happened that the Tory and the Ukip vote was equally split, so Mike Thornton scraped home.

It gave the leadership an excuse to say, ‘Where we work we win’, a claim that irritated many activists, since they were working their socks off and still losing.” Disgruntled Lib Dem activists, mainly based around the left-leaning Social Liberal Forum (SLF), were ready to register their concerns just over a week later at the Lib Dem spring conference, which began on 8 March 2013. After a failed attempt by activists to make the party distance itself from the Tories’ economic policies, Naomi Smith, the SLF chair, began to feel that the party’s future was in jeopardy. “It really became clear to activists that we were going to fight this election on the ridiculous ‘Stronger economy, fairer society’ slogan, this ‘we’ll split the difference’ strategy that meant that you were always defined by other parties. There was the iceberg. Everyone could see it. We were drifting straight towards it. Everyone admitted it and nobody seemed to want to point the ship in a different direction.” There was the iceberg. We were drifting straight towards it and nobody wanted to point the ship in a different direction The warning shots had been fired by the dissidents.

But Clegg trundled on, dutifully carrying out the masochism strategy by turning up every Thursday morning for his weekly mauling at the hands of LBC listeners on his “Call Clegg” phone-in programme. These radio appearances were not only painful, they were time-consuming: each one required that he be prepped as if facing prime minister’s questions – on subjects ranging from the latest developments in Syria to the case of a Sheffield United footballer charged with rape. “Ignorance was never an option”, one of his exhausted aides admitted. Towards the end of the year, attention moved to the final major electoral test before the general election, the May 2014 European parliamentary elections . Clegg’s team in the cabinet office, under the leadership of Jonny Oates, decided to fashion a campaign that was true to his beliefs as a passionate pro-European. They took the novel approach of talking about Europe in a European parliamentary election, and, braver still, decided to brand the Lib Dems as the party “In” on the EU. Confident that his LBC training had made him an adept media performer, Clegg agreed to take part in two TV debates against Nigel Farage during the campaign.

They were not generally perceived to be among Clegg’s most dazzling performances. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem energy and climate change secretary at the time of the debates, was unimpressed. “The disaster over the Farage debate was there was a Liberal Democrat leader who was representing the establishment,” he said. “You looked and you thought if you want to have a pop at the government or the country and people in power you’re not going to vote for Nick because he is the status quo. He didn’t turn Europe into the aspirational change thing that it needs to be.” But Lord Ashdown, the former party leader and Clegg’s mentor, who ran the party’s 2015 general election campaign, thought that his protege acquitted himself well in the face-offs with Farage. “I don’t think it made any difference in the long run,” he said. “What I think did make a difference was that Nick was absolutely flawless throughout the campaign.” Lib Dems line up to choose a winning leader | Letters Read more The European election campaign may have been flawless but the result was a catastrophe. The number of Lib Dem MEPs collapsed from 11 to one, as the party’s overall vote halved, delivering a humiliating fifth place in the share of the vote.

By this point Smith was, she said, certain that the party desperately needed a new leader who was untainted by working closely in coalition with the Conservatives: “It became a case of ABCD – anyone but Clegg or Danny [Alexander].” Although the European results were not declared until Sunday 25 May, after a poor showing in the local elections that took place on the same day, Clegg knew what was coming. He descended into what Ashdown described as “the darkest of the dark nights of the soul”. In a series of phone calls with key figures across the party, Clegg ventured that the time had perhaps come for him to stand down. According to one senior Lib Dem who spoke to Clegg at the time, he said: “If I believe – and I think I’m very close to it – that I am the problem and not the solution, then I have to stand to one side.” But, the source continued, “I told him, ‘You don’t have that luxury – this is your burden now, you have to carry it through to the election.

Whether you believe that or not, it’s tough titty.” Clegg was so worried – and determined to canvass opinion widely – that he even consulted the party president, Tim Farron, a figure from the left of the party who had never been a natural ally. Farron knew there was trouble when Clegg contacted him on a Saturday night, while Farron was attending the wedding of his long-serving aide, Paul Butters. “We ended up interrupting a bit of dad dancing,” Farron recalled. He went outside to the car park to speak to Clegg. “Nick was just distraught about everything and we knew the Euro [results] were going to come the day after, and he felt every single loss personally. There was never a sense of, ‘This is mid-term blues, collateral damage.’ He could feel it and the kind of weight you saw on him and the emotion on his face in that speech on the Friday morning was very real.” Farron advised Clegg to carry on.

“I just thought, ‘This could end up in a bloodbath,’” he recalled, “and we’re far better off sticking with the captain who has done nothing to deserve this.” Ryan Coetzee, the Lib Dems’ director of strategy, said that everybody advised Clegg to stay. “Nick got a pretty relentless answer from practically everybody. So he concluded that the right thing to do was to stay.” It was only days later that Clegg’s small team faced down the coup organised by Oakeshott, which had the tacit support of Cable. Their quick defeat of the rebellion seemed to restore Clegg’s political confidence: “Nick got through that,” Ashdown recalled. “When he’d internalised it, put it behind him, he was like a liberated man in the last six or seven months to the election. It was astonishing the speed from which he moved from the darkest of the dark nights of the soul to utterly on form, utterly clear about what he was doing.” The way was clear for Clegg to run, for himself at least, a relatively relaxed general election campaign in which he served tea to travelling journalists and swung from a zipwire at a park in Devon.

One ally said: “I remember Nick saying to me, ‘Look, I don’t care what the outcome of the election is’ – and he didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was – ‘provided I feel I’ve done the right thing. And we’ve done the best we can.’” * * * A veteran who served with the Royal Marines in Borneo in the 1960s, Paddy Ashdown is a man to turn to when your neck is on the line. With typical bluntness, Ashdown recalled the nature of his mission after Clegg asked him to head up the Lib Dem campaign. “This was a survival election,” he said. “My job was to make sure we survived – by and large.” Ashdown, who joined the elite Special Boat Service after the Royal Marines, called his campaign command centre “the Wheelhouse”. Key aides, including Baroness Grender and Clegg’s long-serving media adviser Lena Pietsch, held three meetings a day of the 11-strong Wheelhouse executive during the campaign. The first stage of their work involved building a ground campaign that would target 50 seats.

At the time, Ashdown believed that it would be possible to win about 25 seats; if things went exceptionally well, he thought, the party could win up to 40. That higher tally was regarded as the magic number required to give the Lib Dems influence in a new coalition. The party’s “air campaign” – national messages aimed at broadcasters – proved painfully frustrating as it dawned on the leadership that they were on course to be swallowed up by their coalition partners. Private polling had persuaded the Tory campaign director Lynton Crosby that Cameron’s most likely route to a majority lay in gobbling up Lib Dem-held seats in the south-west. In the end, 75% of Tory gains were taken from their junior coalition partners. “We knew we had a problem with the south-west – we weren’t completely blindsided,” said one Lib Dem strategist. “When Cameron popped up in Yeovil and Twickenham, alarm bells were ringing, but not as much as they should have been.” About three weeks before polling day, members of the Wheelhouse executive realised the disaster that they were facing. It was clear that the Tories had struck gold with their warnings about a possible tie-up between Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP.

Voters’ fears were exacerbated by the false impression in opinion polls that the election was a neck-and-neck race between Labour and the Tories. “Our vote was being seriously eroded by the Labour/Salmond thing,” Ashdown recalled. “There was a sort of hidden army of people who were so worried about Labour that they literally came out to vote for the first time.” In the nightly meetings of the Wheelhouse executive at 6.45pm, after the main early evening news bulletins, senior party figures complained that it seemed impossible to persuade the broadcasters to move away from the SNP. The party pleaded with the BBC’s director of news, James Harding, to focus more on policy – but the party’s relations with the BBC had been strained during the prolonged negotiation over Clegg’s participation in the leaders’ television debates. Senior figures were stunned when, two weeks before the election, Clegg suddenly suggested to the FT that he would not form a coalition with Labour if it involved any arrangement with the SNP. The signs that he was leaning towards a fresh coalition with the Tories – he criticised Labour for its “frothing bile” towards his party – also alarmed senior aides.

“That caused lots of panic internally,” said one source, who added that Clegg had to be told that he must remain neutral about possible coalition partners. For his part, the party’s communications chief Stephen Lotinga thought the campaign focused too much attention on forming a future coalition with either of the main parties. “We’d slightly drunk our own Kool-Aid,” he said. “But people don’t vote for coalitions … so it’s not a compelling proposition.” Ed Davey feared that it was misguided to pitch the Lib Dems to the electorate as a “moderating force” within a coalition. “We were the centre party – and on one level that sounds really attractive,” he said. “But the old adage of ‘If you’re in the middle of the road, you might get run over’ operated in spades. We were in the middle of the road without any distinction – we had no visibility jacket on. No one could see us, so we really did get run over.” We were in the middle of the road. we had no visibility jacket on. No one could see us, so we really did get run over.

Ed Davey The debate over possible coalitions risked reopening the rift between Clegg’s Orange Book wing of the party and the social democratic faction that leaned toward Labour. Charles Kennedy, the keeper of the social democratic flame, who died a few weeks after losing his Highlands seat, was keen to keep his distance from Clegg: a suggestion that Clegg might visit Kennedy’s constituency in Scotland was met with a curt two-word reply. Other senior parliamentarians sent messages to the wheelhouse team that the party needed to sharpen a “fear” message. In response, the team conjured up the spectre of “ Blukip ” – with Clegg warning that a minority Tory government would be propped up by Ukip and the Northern Irish rightwing Democratic Unionist party. Ashdown was cheerfully honest about a major flaw in the new theme – Ukip was forecast to win no more than a handful of seats. One senior party figure put it more simply: “On Blukip, no one believed it.” Adrian Sanders, who lost his Torbay seat, said: “I just gave up and thought they did not live in the real world. It was just dishonest.

There was no possibility of an alternative coalition built around Ukip.” Amid all the recriminations, Coetzee dismissed the idea that any campaign could have made much difference. If the key issue in many voters’ minds was the threat of the SNP, he argued, there was nothing the Lib Dems could do. “We didn’t have a response that was as powerful as the Tories’,” Coetzee said. “His response was: I’m David Cameron and I’ll tell you the solution to this problem. You give me a majority and there won’t be any SNP in the government.” Pinterest Nick Clegg resigns as leader of the Liberal Democrats On election day, Clegg ended his campaign on an energetic note, rushing from Land’s End to John O’Groats, before finishing in his Sheffield Hallam constituency to await the results. A few hours later, at 10pm, the mood among the Wheelhouse team suddenly soured: as the BBC exit poll indicated that the Lib Dems would hold only 10 seats, a cry of “Shit!” rang around the room.

By 2am, when the education minister David Laws lost his seat in Yeovil, the next morning’s meetings were cancelled, and plans for Clegg’s resignation were set in motion. In the weeks since the election, the Lib Dem meltdown has left many supporters feeling shellshocked. Recently, Clegg was approached by a distressed woman while shopping on his local high street in Putney. Speaking through tears, she told Clegg that his party did not deserve the battering it had received from the British electorate. Buoyed by the heartfelt sympathy from a wellwisher, Clegg told the woman not to worry and thanked her for supporting the Lib Dems – only to be told that she had voted Green. “People were quite angry,” Coetzee said. “They wanted to dish out a slap on the wrist – and then found they’d cut the hand off and were quite horrified by what had happened.

Then they went around saying: ‘Oh I’m terribly sorry, I’ve cut your hand off.’” • Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | The Nick Clegg story Printable version The Nick Clegg story Nick Clegg - who has been elected leader of the Liberal Democrat party by the narrowest of margins - was tipped for great things almost from the moment he entered Parliament in 2005. Age: 40 Education: Westminster School, Cambridge University Before MP: Journalist, lecturer and Euro MP Profile: Lib Dem 'first lady' One of a generation of bright "young Turks" promoted to the frontbench by former leader Sir Menzies Campbell, he will be, at 40, the youngest party leader in the UK - beating Conservative leader David Cameron by three months. A fluent television performer, he placed much emphasis during his leadership campaign on his skills as a communicator - claiming he could reach out to voters disaffected by party politics. In his acceptance speech, he said his leadership would be about "ambition and change" - stressing that he wanted to forge a "liberal alternative" to the discredited policies of "big government".

Thatcher era He is seen as being on the liberal economic wing of the party and, as such, is expected to appeal to wavering Tory voters or those Lib Dems attracted to Mr Cameron's party. He faced accusations during the leadership campaign that he was a "clone" of David Cameron - something he angrily denied. He was given his first job in politics by a Conservative, former Cabinet minister Sir Leon Brittan, but resisted attempts to recruit him to the party. He says his politics were forged in the Thatcher era - when he opposed everything the then Tory leader stood for. In his acceptance speech, he said he was a liberal by temperament and instinct, adding: "I believe liberalism is the thread that holds together everything this country stands for." Aristocratic grandmother With his Dutch and Russian heritage, and more than a decade working in Brussels, Mr Clegg is probably the most Eurocentric of Britain's party leaders. An accomplished skier, who reputedly speaks five languages, he is married to a leading commercial lawyer, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, a former Middle East expert at the foreign office, whose father was a conservative senator in the Spanish parliament.

Nick Clegg and wife Miriam have two young children The couple, who met while studying at the College of Europe in Bruges, live in South London have two young sons. When Ms Gonzalez Durantez gave birth to the first of their children, Mr Clegg took a long period of paternity leave so that she could return to work first. Mr Clegg's father, a banker, is half Russian and his aristocratic grandmother fled St Petersburg after the tsar was ousted. His mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, a special needs teacher, is Dutch and arrived in Britain, aged 12, after being incarcerated in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia. Show business connections Mr Clegg is said to favour hiking in the hills near his Sheffield Hallam constituency, a well-heeled part of the city where he won more than 50% of the vote, to the London party circuit. But he can boast a few show business connections. TV presenter Louis Theroux and his novelist brother Marcel are friends - he once took a road trip across America with the pair, during which, to the amusement of the brothers, he frequently practised transcendental meditation.

Film director Sam Mendes is also a friend and he once acted opposite a teenage Helena Bonham-Carter in a university play about Aids. Mr Clegg was educated at Westminster school, one of the country's top public schools. Friends recall a "spotty" but self-confident teenager with a keen sense of fun, who sought out the limelight in school plays. The one blot in his copybook came when, as a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he and a friend were arrested for setting fire to a collection of rare cacti belonging to a professor. 'Drunken prank' The incident appeared on the front page of the local newspaper in Munich. Mr Clegg has since described the incident as a "drunken prank," of which he was "not proud". He was given community service and had to spend the summer digging gardens. I hope I've inherited some of my mum's unerring compassion, her ability to see potential in everyone, her despair at the class system, and her total belief in justice Nick Clegg After studying anthropology at Cambridge, he briefly became, in his own words, a "ski bum" and tried to write a novel, which he later described as "embarrassingly bad".

He won a postgraduate scholarship to the University of Minnesota where he studied the political philosophy of green campaigners. He tried his hand at journalism, as an intern in New York on left-wing magazine The Nation. He took full advantage of New York's nightlife - in one picture from the period he appears in drag with friend Marcel Theroux at a party with, in Marcel's words, his "fashionista" friends. Talent-spotted After a spell in Hungary, where he was sent as the first winner of the Financial Times David Thomas Prize, he went to work for European Commissioner Leon Brittan, in Brussels. It was here that he began to make his mark in the world of politics. He managed aid projects in the poorest parts of Russia and led the EU's negotiations on China and Russia's entry into the World Trade Organisation. A brief spell as a lecturer at Sheffield University followed before he became a Liberal Democrat MEP in 1999. Former Lib Dem leaders have rallied behind Mr Clegg He was talent-spotted by the then Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown and it was not long before he was swapping Brussels for Westminster.

Despite his relative inexperience, he was tipped as a future leader almost from the moment he arrived in the Commons in 2005. Loyal He did not have to wait long for his first chance. He was among 25 MPs who refused to go on serving under Charles Kennedy, as details of his alcohol problems emerged. Friends urged him to throw his hat into the ring when Mr Kennedy finally stood down. But he decided to back Sir Menzies Campbell instead - on the understanding, it is said, that Sir Menzies would back him for the top job when the time came. His loyalty was rewarded with the high-profile home affairs brief, spearheading the party's defence of civil liberties, speaking out against ID cards and proposing a freedom bill to repeal what he perceives as illiberal legislation. His most eyecatching - and controversial - proposal was "earned" citizenship for illegal immigrants, described by opponents as an "amnesty". Seafront confrontation As leadership speculation began to swirl around Sir Menzies at this year's party conference in Brighton, Mr Clegg's name was inevitably thrust into the frame - and he did little to dampen speculation by admitting he would stand if there was a vacancy.

Sir Menzies' wife, Lady Elspeth, in a famous seafront confrontation, said she did not know whether he was being helpful or not. Sir Menzies may have shocked Westminster a few weeks later when he handed in his resignation - but no one was surprised when his young protege entered the race to succeed him. Mr Clegg began as favourite - with the backing of the majority of the party's MPs and grandees such as Paddy Ashdown. He ran a measured, even at times low-key leadership campaign, as he sought to avoid being drawn into public rows with Mr Huhne. But his image as an unflappable performer took a knock during televised debates, appearing angry and flustered when accused by Mr Huhne of "flip-flopping" on policy. 'Compassion' The two men clashed over the Trident missile programme, which Mr Huhne pledged to dump. Mr Clegg argued that such a move would destroy the UK's bargaining power in non-proliferation talks in 2010. He tried to appeal to all sections of the party - by stressing his liberal instincts and background.

He has said the biggest influence on his politics was his mother, who was imprisoned by the Japanese during the Second World War. "I became a liberal not in a library, but over the dinner table, in the car, in the park, in conversation with my mum," Mr Clegg told the Lib Dem Voice website earlier this year. He added: "I hope I've inherited some of my mum's unerring compassion, her ability to see potential in everyone, her despair at the class system, and her total belief in justice." Lib Dem leader resigns: The Nick Clegg Story - BBC News BBC News Lib Dem leader resigns: The Nick Clegg Story 8 May 2015 Close share panel Image copyright Reuters Nick Clegg's political journey has seen him win a bitter Liberal Democrat leadership battle, rise to become deputy prime minister, and face furious criticism over his U-turn on tuition fees. But despite retaining his own parliamentary seat in 2015, he has resigned as Lib Dem leader after disastrous election results saw the party crushed at the polls. He was once mentioned in the same breath as Winston Churchill and took his party up to notable highs and now down to painful lows in its popularity.

Personally, he has taken the well-trodden path of failed novelist, American road tripper and schoolboy prankster. Born in 1967 in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, he is the third of four children of Nicholas Peter Clegg CBE, chairman of United Trust Bank. Nicholas senior is half Russian and his aristocratic grandmother fled St Petersburg after the tsar was ousted. The younger Nicholas's friends at Westminster School, one of the country's top private schools and located a few hundred metres from the Houses of Parliament, recall the future politician a "spotty" but self-confident teenager with a keen sense of fun. Image copyright AP Image caption Nick Clegg, second left, on a tennis court with friends in London in 1984 Image copyright AP Image caption Mr Clegg performed at Westminster School in Noel Coward's comedy Blithe Spirit He apparently sought out the limelight in school plays, providing a grounding for the grilling he was one day to face when in the political spotlight. All that energy seems to have spilled over somewhat when, as a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he and a friend were arrested for setting fire to a collection of rare cacti belonging to a professor.

Mr Clegg has described the incident as a "drunken prank," of which he was "not proud". He was sentenced to community service and had to spend the summer digging gardens. After studying anthropology at Cambridge, he briefly became, in his own words, a "ski bum" and tried to write a novel, which he later described as "embarrassingly bad". He took a road trip across America with his friend Louis Theroux, the documentary maker, and his novelist brother, Marcel. It was during this time, in the best traditions of road trippers everywhere and to the amusement of the Theroux brothers, he practised transcendental meditation. After completing a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Minnesota, Mr Clegg began a career in journalism as an intern in New York on left-wing magazine The Nation. He then had a spell in Hungary, where he was sent as the first winner of the Financial Times David Thomas Prize, before going to work for European Commissioner Leon Brittan in Brussels.

Image caption Nick Clegg's leadership battle with Chris Huhne was an uncomfortable one Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Nick Clegg, with his wife Miriam, celebrated becoming Lib Dem leader in December 2007 Image copyright AFP Image caption The new Lib Dem leader took over aged 40 from 66-year-old Sir Menzies Campbell The Tory grandee says the young Mr Clegg always resisted attempts to recruit him to the Conservative Party. While at the European Commission, Mr Clegg managed aid projects in the poorest parts of Russia and led the EU's negotiations on China and Russia's entry into the World Trade Organisation. Little wonder that, after all his travels, he should be able to speak French, Dutch, German, and Spanish. A brief spell as a lecturer at Sheffield University followed before he became a Liberal Democrat MEP in 1999. In 2000, Mr Clegg married leading commercial lawyer Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, a former Middle East expert at the Foreign Office. The couple, who met while studying at the College of Europe in Bruges, live in south-west London with their three children, Antonio, Alberto and Miguel.

She has revealed that she and their three boys have been writing an anonymous cookery blog for three years. In it, the family share recipes including shrimp tortillas, milk buns and lemon posset, apparently without Lib Dem advisers knowing. What they think of the Cleggs' cooking is also unclear. Media captionNick Clegg: "I must take responsibility and therefore I announce that I will be resigning as leader of the Liberal Democrats'' Eventually the young MEP was talent-spotted by the then-Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown and it was not long before he was swapping Brussels for Westminster. Despite his relative inexperience, he was tipped as a future leader almost from the moment he arrived in the Commons in 2005, as the MP for Sheffield Hallam. He did not have to wait long to get his chance, when Sir Menzies Campbell unexpectedly quit as leader in 2007. Mr Clegg was part of a new generation of Lib Dem MPs who saw themselves as classical liberals - believers in free trade, free markets and individual liberty.

But despite starting as firm favourite, he was nearly beaten to the leadership by a figure from the left of the party, Chris Huhne, after a closely fought, and at times fractious, contest. Mr Huhne had to issue an apology over a briefing paper printed during the leadership battle which described his leadership rival as a "calamity". Image caption Mr Clegg was widely acknowledged to have come out best of three party leaders in the first TV debate in 2010 Image copyright AFP Image caption David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed a coalition government in 2010 The defining moment of Mr Clegg's political career came in the May 2010 general election campaign, when he took part in Britain's first televised leaders debates. The Lib Dem leader outshone David Cameron and Gordon Brown in the first of their three encounters, with "I agree with Nick" becoming the catchphrase of the debate, falling from the lips of his opponents on several occasions. Mr Clegg's performance sparked headlines claiming he was the most popular politician since Winston Churchill and vitriolic attacks from right-leaning newspapers who had previously ignored him.

The expected poll boost largely failed to materialise, but the Lib Dems still had enough MPs to effectively hold the balance of power in a hung Parliament when the votes had been counted. Mr Clegg, as the new deputy prime minister, famously stood next to the new prime minister, David Cameron, in the garden at 10 Downing Street for the new government's first press conference. In a light-hearted moment, Mr Cameron admitted he once branded his new coalition partner a "joke". At which point the deputy PM then pretended to storm off - prompting Mr Cameron to plead with him to "come back". His unfavourable assessment of the man who was now his closest new government colleague was recorded in a 2008 book by GQ editor Dylan Jones, who asked him for his favourite joke. "Nick Clegg, at the moment," Mr Cameron had apparently told him.

When asked by a reporter about the jibe and whether he said it, Mr Cameron turned to Mr Clegg and confessed: "I'm afraid I did." Image copyright AP Image caption Nick Clegg fought his second general election campaign as Lib Dem leader in 2015 Image copyright AFP Image caption Mr Clegg's campaigning has taken him to such locations as this nursery in Bearsden, Scotland This verbal battering did not seem to get the pair off on the wrong foot, however. When making his deal with the Conservatives, Mr Clegg reasoned that he could secure more of the Lib Dems' priorities in coalition with Mr Cameron than with Labour - and he won the backing of his party for the deal at a special conference. He pointed to his early successes where he won a "pupil premium" to pump money into schools in disadvantaged areas, a referendum on electoral reform - which he lost - and an increase in the tax-free allowance to £10,000. In return, he accepted the scale and speed of the Conservatives' spending cuts, sparking a mass defection of left-wing Lib Dem members and voters. He also decided to support a rise in tuition fees, something he had opposed when in opposition.

In fact, he, along with all Lib Dem MPs elected in 2010, had signed a National Union of Students (NUS) pledge to vote against any rise. It was a move that split his MPs, led to much agonising among his ministers and a cry of betrayal from students who had voted for him - and who now took to the streets in protest. The Lib Dem leader said last year that he had "perhaps rightly" received a lot of criticism over the tuition fees U-turn. His apology even went viral after being set to music. Image copyright PA Image caption The Liberal Democrat leader remains an influential figure in British politics That, and other compromises of coalition are being seen as the major reason for the Liberal Democrats' disastrous general election performance, with the party forecast to retain just eight of their 57 House of Commons seats. Mr Clegg retained his Sheffield Hallam seat, but in a speech resigning as Lib Dem leader, he said results had been "immeasurably more crushing and unkind than I could ever have feared", adding that he "of course... must take responsibility".

His role in government is now over, but what influence he will be able to bring to bear on the unpredictable British political landscape remains to be seen. Media captionNick Clegg: "I must take responsibility and therefore I announce that I will be resigning as leader of the Liberal Democrats''

Question: Nick Clegg became the new leader of the Lib Dems after an election in December 2007, who did he beat?
Answer: Chris Huhne