Nick Clegg Biography

Nick Clegg was the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom from 2007-15, and served as the U.K.’s Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition formed with Prime Minister David Cameron of the Conservative Party from 2010-15.

Nick Clegg studied anthropology at Cambridge (graduating in 1989), then studied political philosophy for a year at the University of Minnesota and later at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. For five years he worked for the European Commission in Brussels, and in 1999 he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands.

Clegg resigned that post in 2004, and in 2005 he was elected as a U.K. Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam. By the end of 2007, he’d achieved the position of party leader for the Liberal Democrats, aiming to boost the popularity of his party as an alternative to the Conservatives on one side and the Labour Party on the other.

The close elections of May 2010 resulted in a hung parliament, but Clegg and his party emerged as a viable alternative to Labour’s Gordon Brown, putting Clegg in position to demand a voice in the new coalition government under Cameron. A dyed-in-the-wool liberal, Clegg aggravated some in his own party by working with the Conservatives, and U.K. loyalists considered his multinationalism to be suspect, at best. But he gained a reputation for being an honest, if sometimes naive, reformer.

After a weak showing for Liberal Democrats in the elections of 2015, Clegg stepped down as party leader. He was then defeated in the general election of 2017, losing his seat as MP to Labour’s Jared O’Mara.