“Joyous disbelief” in Brussels over Nick Clegg’s rise

by | Apr 21, 2010


Tony Barber in Brussels:

Viewed from Brussels, the rise of Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats in Britain’s election campaign is a fantasy come true.  For most of its 37 years in the European Union, Britain has been the bloc’s most awkward, cussed member-state.  Now, the unthinkable is happening.  Britain’s opinion polls are topped by a party whose leader spent five years working at the European Commission and another five years as a MEP in the European Parliament.  Gott am Himmel!  A Brit who actually understands the place!

And it doesn’t stop there.  Clegg studied at the elite College of Europe in Bruges, an institution geared to producing crop after crop of graduates with a lifelong enthusiasm for EU integration.  He speaks Dutch, French, German and Spanish, making him as proficient a linguist as such dedicated Europeans as Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s full-time president, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg premier.

Clegg has a Dutch mother, a half-Russian father and three children called Antonio, Alberto and Miguel.  There has been no British party leader like him since the EU’s 1957 Treaty of Rome.  In fact, you may have to go all the way back to Charles James Fox, the Whig who briefly served as foreign secretary in the Napoleonic wars, to find a British statesman whose mental outlook was so naturally rooted in Europe.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!  Clegg’s emergence is enough to make even the most agnostic Eurocrat think that there must be a god, after all.

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.


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