An interview with Nick Clegg

NB: The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. A shorter video interview with Nick Clegg can be found here.

THE ECONOMIST: Your ratings have collapsed. Can you tell us why?

MR CLEGG: I think some of it is obvious. The very act of entering into a coalition with one of the larger parties was always going to lose us a big chunk of our support. In my view it was immaterial whether it was with the Conservatives or with Labour. That dice was thrown for us by the voters. But if we’d gone into coalition with Labour we would have had a catastrophic loss of support among centrist/Conservative voters who had voted for us in constituencies in the south west, in the same way that we've obviously suffered particularly badly (by going into coalition with the Conservatives) in Wales, Scotland and the north of England: the more anti-conservative parts of the country. That's probably inevitable, as is the fact that we're a government, like all governments, operating in the shadow of 2008 doing a lot of difficult, gory, downright unpopular things.

THE ECONOMIST: That doesn't quite seem to cover the full catastrophic drama of your collapse in the polls.

MR CLEGG: I wouldn't get too breathless about this. I think it covers most of it in the sense that there is clearly a section of the support we had in 2010 that was virulently anti-Conservative. They're the ones who still scream and shout blue murder and have done so without pause for breath for half a decade. And they're loud and they're noisy and they're angry. And that was a significant chunk of support that basically wanted to be associated with any party that didn't have the remotest sniff of power. There just is a constituency out there that wants to be entirely bereft of any responsibility. So they're clearly also very pissed off. And then, given quite how strong our standing was, particularly in large parts of the public sector, I think it is wholly predictable and totally unsurprising that a significant number of people who have found their pensions chopped and changed, you know, what they earn limited year-in year-out, and they've seen job reductions in the public sector because of the wider fiscal entrenchment over the last few years—they're also at risk of being disenchanted. And then there’s what appears to be, which might be unjust and might be a bit cruel, but there you go, a bit of a rule of thumb for smaller parties in coalitions, not just here but elsewhere in Europe. It seems to be a bit of a pattern that smaller parties tend to get a disproportionate amount of the blame for the bad stuff and not their proportionate share of the credit for the good stuff. That's happened to us just as much as it’s happened to everyone else.

So in my own view, those are probably more important explanations than tuition fees, or this decision or that decision, although those obviously play a part. The irony of course is that before 2010 we did well (with the benefit of hindsight) partly because our identity was quite opaque. Other people will no doubt say the contrary, but I would argue that our ideological identity is now sharper and harder—but our support has clearly narrowed, temporarily in my view, but nonetheless narrowed.

THE ECONOMIST: On that, all three mainstream parties have pretty much shrunk to their base support. Is this a measure of your base support: 7-8%?

MR CLEGG: I don't know. I find it very difficult to be scientific about this partly because these polls are just meaningless in areas where we actually are communicating with people, so it's “take your pick”. It's like going to different galaxies at the moment. You go to Sheffield Hallam and you'll talk to thousands and thousands of our citizens who know who the Liberal Democrats are and what they've done. And then you go to the next street and it’s a sort of Liberal desert.

THE ECONOMIST: Do you ever wish you’d had another term in opposition to whip the party into shape?

MR CLEGG: It's genuinely what I originally thought was going to happen. I always thought it was more likely that we were going to end up in a coalition of sorts in this forthcoming general election. I think you can be too clever about these things. Would it have been more convenient to be in a government for the first time where you're not doing emergency surgery on the nation’s finances? Well, obviously yes. But you don't do these things at a stately pace.

THE ECONOMIST: Did you ever regret being in the coalition?

MR CLEGG: No. God no! Far from it! Quite the reverse. I constantly get interviewed in these rather funereal terms. This ludicrous assumption, and I'm not saying you're doing this, that it’s the end of liberalism. It's not! Of course it's bloody not! Things go up, things go down. They've gone down now and what we need to do on May 7th, over the next few days and weeks, is be very, very resilient and be very tough and very organised.

THE ECONOMIST: Tell us about that. How do you salvage a decent election result?

MR CLEGG: Well it's a very defensive election contest for us, where we are absolutely focussing purely and exclusively and remorselessly in these areas where we think we can win. We're not going to waste any time, any effort, any money, any energy on places where we're not going to win—which, by the way, is the vast majority of the country. Which is why this endless national polls stuff doesn't tell me very much.

THE ECONOMIST: And are those the 57 constituencies you won last time?

MR CLEGG: There are a few seats we hope to pinch. There are a few seats, frankly, where we know we're not going to do as well and many other seats where I think we're going to pull off a lot of surprises. What I mean is: we're like any political party under pressure. We're going to strengthen the battlements in the areas where we think we can win, and when we're out the other side, in my view in much larger numbers in Parliament than people presently predict, then of course we’ll need to expand out again because there are great parts of the country now where there is just no Liberal Democrat presence. That's where we've been badly knocked back, particularly against Labour and particularly in parts of the north of England and elsewhere.

THE ECONOMIST: That retrenchment, defensive campaigning, really means relentless focus on the local electioneering that delivered those constituencies to you in the first place. Isn't there a risk that you lose some of that greater ideological clarity you think you now have?

MR CLEGG: No, no. Because you still need to speak to the nation. I will still be interviewed, and we'll still have a national manifesto and we still have a philosophy and a set of values and policies associated with them which I think are coherent and liberal. Here’s the irony: it's exactly when the British Liberal Democrats are under the greatest pressure in the polls that we are most needed in British politics, if you look at the fragmentation and populism, and the way both the largest parties are deserting the liberal, reasoned centre ground. And it’s also a time when I think our identity is being sharpened by the experience of government rather than weakened. So the irony is: I think our value to the national political life is greater than it was before because liberalism is under threat on all sorts of fronts. Our identity's sharpened but clearly our psephological fortunes are at a low ebb.

THE ECONOMIST: You will not be spending any money on pushing your national message? You get your free quota of statutory advertising but all of the marketing promotional spend goes on local literature?

MR CLEGG: Not quite all of it. I need to buy my sandwiches! So there is a national spend but we're not going to squander any money other than in those places where we think it makes a difference to how people finally vote.

THE ECONOMIST: Give us a tour d’horizon of Lib Dem redoubts. Apart from Sheffield Hallam, how does it feel?

MR CLEGG: Well it just feels a lot, lot, lot better than this endless funereal analysis of our fortunes would suggest. And I think the reason for that is where we get to tell our side of the story (because obviously no-one does it on a daily basis for us) it's a good story. It's a very, very good story. And you need to be quite a bad campaign not to make our song sing because it's a very, very powerful narrative. The country was in schtuck in 2010, the only way that the country could pull back from the brink was by us stepping up to the plate. We did it, it was a brave thing to do, it was a good thing to do, it was a noble thing to do. We could have been Greece; we're not. We provided political stability without which economic recovery was impossible. And, to boot, we have delivered a whole bevvy of things that we only dreamed of delivering before: from tax reforms, to pension reforms, to the pupil premium, to all the apprenticeships, which are very, very popular and, where communicated repeatedly enough, are very closely associated with us in those areas.

THE ECONOMIST: Those are the things that you cite as Lib Dem which you think within the coalition…

MR CLEGG: Well above and beyond everything else, the economic recovery of course...

THE ECONOMIST: But distinctive Lib Dem achievements within the coalition?

MR CLEGG: The ones I most distinctively associate with us are obviously the tax reforms, income tax, the personal allowance. Danny [Alexander] and I have done all that. Everything to do with early years, two-, three-, four-year-olds, the pupil premium, the thing that you [The Economist] don't like: the healthy meals at lunchtime, which have a very positive pedagogical effect despite your unempirical assertion to the contrary.

THE ECONOMIST: Pork and other food…

MR CLEGG: Bollocks! It has powerful effect on social mobility. But all the education stuff, including apprenticeships, which of course Vince [Cable] led on, the pension reforms are both very popular and very good and they're very much authored by Steve Webb. So those are the kinds of things we cite and people can decide how they want to chop and change them with more local things. But those are the kind of signatory things that show people what, of course, no-one will hear in a national debate which is that we've delivered good things which wouldn't have been delivered without us.

THE ECONOMIST: And as a small party having to wrest ownership for those things, some of them clearly Lib Dem ideas, how difficult is that? Obviously Osborne is trumpeting the increase in the allowance…

MR CLEGG: The allowance is probably the most interesting one, just because we've been going on about it for close to a decade now. There's very little for the Conservatives in our seats to do to take ownership of it just because no-one believes it. What I mean is that from a voter’s point of view, they might read some claim in the Daily Telegraph, or a clip on the news, but they've been hearing for about a decade now week-in week-out from all the Liberal Democrats: this was our thing when it was first delivered. I remain perplexed about the Conservatives’ behaviour for the first three years or so of this government. They made it unbelievably difficult to deliver it. They didn't want it. They kept constantly pushing us to make concessions elsewhere in order to deliver it... So, anyway, they realised very late in the day that it was a monumentally popular thing to do. It was a very, very good reform. We spent squillions on it, so they might as well, quite logically, try and take ownership of it as well. But I think in those areas where we can create our own microclimates, it's quite difficult for them to do that. Other things vary a bit more. But I think on the allowance in particular we have quite a commanding ownership of that where it matters to us.

THE ECONOMIST: How differentiated is this national message between your Labour face and your Tory face?

MR CLEGG: Not hugely. But actually we were always accused in the past of being a party that was all things to all people. And I think you'll find that, under pressure nonetheless, what has emerged is a greater consistency of message. And I like to think that's reflected locally. So I think you find the right balance between both the economy and also doing things as fairly as possible in pursuit of the great liberal goal of greater opportunity.

THE ECONOMIST: But complicated.

MR CLEGG: Not really.

THE ECONOMIST: Do you think you've got the balance right between differentiation and credit taking for what the government has done?

MR CLEGG: I've always thought of the differentiation stuff as a complete nonsense, a Westminster village thing. "Oh they're trying to differentiate.” They're not. It is a coalition. It is two parties. So people are saying “they're trying to differentiate by saying they're different.” But we are different.

THE ECONOMIST: But it was a conscious strategy. I remember Richard Reeves [Mr Clegg’s former director of strategy] sitting with me in Brighton in 2012 and saying: “these are the three stages of the government.”

MR CLEGG: I'll tell you what I do accept. At the beginning, when the coalition was formed, there was a hysterical level of pessimism about the ability of the coalition government to function at all. And it wasn't just the lunatics, the Mail and others. It was wall-to-wall predictions that it would collapse next week, collapse next month. And I remember thinking at the time that the most important thing we needed to do in the first few crucial months of this government was simply to show that government could function. So I was quite disciplinary with my team; “Look, we're not going to have any nonsense, public spats, and this and that and the other. We just have to show that we can govern.” So from the rose garden until spring/summer of 2011, I was very rigid about being completely limpet-like in saying that the government acts and acts as one. I think that was right. I personally feel very vindicated by that. I think if we hadn't done that the government wouldn't have survived for five years and actually wouldn't have built up the sort of bedrock of stability upon which you can then build the open arguments which clearly need to exist in a coalition. A coalition needs to breathe. But you don't need to do that next time. I think you needed to do it this time just to show people (there was such a mountain of scepticism to climb) that the coalition would work. I'm sure Richard was alluding to that: that we needed to show that the government could function. And that required discipline.

But after that you could be much more unbuttoned and unclenched. It's just the nature of coalition government that you obviously have to fight your own corner, you obviously have debates, you have arguments. One side says A, one side says B, you compromise on C. Sometimes you don't compromise, if you don't agree. And of course you have to show that. If you don't show that, then it's not faithful to the new form of government that you're trying to form. And the problem we have, of course, is that because of the dessicated way in which Westminster politics is still portrayed, people can't compute a government of two parties. Any time the two parties say “actually we're two separate parties”, it has to be crisis. Well, I think what will need to change is not coalition government, because it's going to happen over and over again in my view, but the prism through which it's seen. The idiom through which British politics is interpreted or portrayed is just so out of step with the way coalition government and politics work. Both here and, by the way, in other countries which are used to coalition politics.

THE ECONOMIST: Does your own considerable unpopularity (if the polls are right) influence the way you campaign in your chosen constituencies? Do you go down better in some sorts of constituencies than others?

MR CLEGG: [Laughs.] You'll need to talk to the pollsters. I'm told I'm monumentally popular with Liberal Democrats, and Liberal Democrat-inclined voters

THE ECONOMIST: Is that right?

MR CLEGG: I'm honestly too British to start trying to provide you with an analysis of my own popularity.

THE ECONOMIST: That's a completely unacceptable get-out. A completely unacceptable piece of English charm! A bit of Dutch frankness maybe?

MR CLEGG: A bit of Dutch frankness! No, it hasn't changed my plans very much. Honestly and genuinely I find it very difficult to be scientific about this. But I'm probably the most accessible and out-there politician of any of the party leaders. While Miliband and Cameron are yelling at each other I go and do a Q&A with Mumsnet. I do my LBC show every Thursday morning. I'm doing a session tomorrow evening in Sheffield where hundreds of people can come and ask me questions.

THE ECONOMIST: Do you feel your unpopularity much when you do things like that?

MR CLEGG: No. But that's what they probably don't come to. You’ll just have to talk to the pollsters. I do my own entirely unscientific experiment involving thousands upon thousands upon thousands of members of the public every week and I just don't feel it at all. I mean not at all. Am I carried aloft on a spirit of joy and bunting? No, of course not. But do I feel that people want to engage in a civilised and sometimes, dare I say, in an unalloyed positive way? Yeah, they do. But of course there's a whole bunch of people who just detest the fact that the Liberal Democrats are part of the government. So if you're Paul Dacre on the one side, or the editor of the Daily Mirror on the other, you bloody hate the Lib Dems and you work yourself into an absolute lather.

THE ECONOMIST: And when people do have a pop at you, it's presumably mainly for tuition fees and the apology?

MR CLEGG: Not necessarily, though that comes up a fair amount.

THE ECONOMIST: Do you not think “never apologise” is pretty good mantra?

MR CLEGG: No, the apology doesn't come up at all. No, what comes up is: “you said one thing and then you couldn't do the other.”

THE ECONOMIST: What's your response to that?

MR CLEGG: For me, the flaming obvious: I'm not the prime minister, I can't do what I want, I can't implement my manifesto in full. I've never hidden that. And you mention the apology, but I've no regrets apologising. In fact I'd love to hear an apology from Ed Miliband for saying “no boom and bust” and being part of the government that drove the economy into a brick wall. Or from Cameron for (against my personal advice to him) making a no-ifs-no-buts promise on net immigration figures and then spectacularly breaking that. Have you heard a breath of an apology from them? So I don't think it's the apology so much. I think what sets the tuition fees thing apart is that it's about people's kids’ education. Nothing more. People feel, quite rightly, visceral about that and that's what sets it apart. But where people are prepared to listen, I point out it's the fairest deal I could get in the circumstances. Actually the system, despite all the predictions at the time, has worked pretty well. More people going to universities than ever before, youngsters going from disadvantaged families. Actually what, in effect, we've introduced is actually a highly progressive graduate tax. If only we'd called it that it would have saved me heartache. And of course the reason people are going to university in larger numbers than ever before is because they've worked it out for themselves. They've got their calculators out around the kitchen table and worked it out: “oh right, you don't have to pay anything up front.” Because you used to have to under Labour. So I try and be open about the fact that with 8% of MPs in the House of Commons I can't, in a democracy, be expected to implement the full swathe of our manifesto and so on and so forth. And I've long learnt now that there will be some people who will use tuition fees as a reason to say “we'll never forgive the Liberal Democrats”. And I suspect that for a fair number of them if it wasn't tuition fees it would be something else.

THE ECONOMIST: Of course

MR CLEGG: NHS, or VAT or something. But, my task (which I personally think is going much better than people imagine) is to say: “OK, fine, I’ll take that on the chin. But please also credit us for the hundreds of things that we have done.”

THE ECONOMIST: What are the coalition agreement’s strengths and weaknesses and what might you have done differently in retrospect?

MR CLEGG: The agreement was actually remarkable given how quickly it was drafted.

THE ECONOMIST: Would you take more time over it next time?

MR CLEGG: Actually I don't think the last five years suggest we would have necessarily improved it that much by spending much more time on it. And also, as I said earlier, this coalition was born, firstly, in an economic firestorm and, secondly, in the teeth of this slightly loopy hysteria: “Oh my god if there isn't a government formed by lunchtime on Tuesday the sky will fall on our heads.” So we had to just get on with it. I hope next time people will be a little bit more patient. Patience might actually help produce the kind of result that the country needs. But Danny Alexander and Oliver Letwin were explaining to us yesterday (I think it was yesterday) that it’s extraordinary how 90% of that coalition agreement has been implemented. And from my point of view it's of particular satisfaction to see that more of our manifesto was in that coalition agreement than the Conservatives’ one. So I think the thing that I would probably reflect on next time is: once you've got a coalition agreement, what do you do half-way through? Particularly in a fixed-term parliament. Do you have another coalition agreement? We had a sort of update. In my view that's the slightly more interesting question. The idea that you have a tablet of stone that remains immutable over half a decade is perhaps not quite realistic. We actually raced through quite a lot of it in the early stages.

THE ECONOMIST: Would you spread your ministers across government again in the way you did this time? As opposed to taking a few departments?

MR CLEGG: Yes I think so. I'd like to take the education department if I could. I feel we've wasted a lot of time with some rather fruitless and rather fruit-cakey policy spasms that don't make any difference to the education system, which I would have liked to get my hands on more fully. And also just because education is absolutely core to the liberal promise. So I might want to try and have secretaries of states in a different department. But I think the idea that you have a few secretaries of state as a smaller party, but obviously not as many as the larger party, and then you try and have ministers in as many of the other departments as possible—I think that makes sense. I think the Swedish liberals just monopolised one department but I just don't think would work in the British political system because it means you'd get held responsible for everything else and you'd have rogue secretaries of state from other parties just doing completely immoral things and then you'd spend all your time trying to stop it. I think it's worth having an early warning system in those departments which you don't outright run.

THE ECONOMIST: Are you pleased you took charge of constitutional affairs?

MR CLEGG: Well I wouldn't do that again now. Funnily enough I think it’s going to loom very, very large in the next parliament. I think both Europe and constitutional affairs will loom massively and I bet they will barely feature in the general election campaign, principally because neither of the two larger parties want to talk about either. But actually they're going to loom very large in the next parliament just because the constitutional cat is out of the bag after the Scottish referendum and we've got this rather misshapen, “pantomime horse” approach to constitutional reform which does need to resolve itself in a more satisfactory way. But it was a perfectly logical thing for me to do in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, which was very much a backcloth to the creation of this government that people have quickly forgotten. People forget that in the run-up to the 2010 general election it was MPs’ expenses and a general rage against Westminster and the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis that loomed largest. And then, of course, as soon as the coalition was formed (what with Greece) the degree of anxiety around the economy just obliterated everything else, including constitutional affairs, which is why the AV referendum in the spring of 2011 suddenly felt slightly out of place. Because we'd had several months of remorseless discussion about cuts and comprehensive spending rows and so on and so forth. But these are the things you can only see with that level of clarity afterwards.

THE ECONOMIST: You don't regret not taking on a big department of your own?

MR CLEGG: Certainly not now that I know the way Whitehall works. The whole timber of Whitehall bends towards the Napoleonic rule that only one person in Downing Street counts. You have to really pull that timber back to serve two masters not one and I don't think you can do that while you're immersed in the day-to-day job of running a department. So I think it's actually hugely important, most especially for a smaller party, to have the leader not submerged in departmental work and able to use political clout, without deep baronial departmental interests, to knock heads together, to strike deals, to create balance across the coalition. I think it’s essential to avoid that pitfall. If I were the larger party in a coalition in the British system I would do everything to try to persuade the leader of the smaller party to take some fancy departmental title. Because it's the best way to pigeonhole them.

THE ECONOMIST: If you find yourself in a coalition negotiation with 25-30-35 seats—a significantly smaller number than last time around—will your demands be inevitably more modest? What could you realistically hope for?

MR CLEGG: It's a difficult question, that, because of course the principle of legitimacy means that the claims you make have to flow from the mandate you receive in some proportionate sense; from the votes you've received. On the other hand there's also a brute reality, which is that if you make up the numbers which deliver the majority then you have huge leverage. But that's why if we end up exploring the possibility of a coalition with A.N.Other party I very much hope to do it from a position of strength rather than weakness.

THE ECONOMIST: Sure you do, but how many seats do you need to realistically claim to be deputy prime minister for example?

MR CLEGG: I haven't got a threshold number. But of course your standing is stronger the more MPs you've got and you're weaker the fewer you've got.

THE ECONOMIST: What is the state of liberalism now and what is its state if the Lib Dems are severely reduced in this election?

MR CLEGG: The state of liberalism in British society, you could argue, is actually very strong. So many of the long-term trends in society are moving in a liberal direction: greater personal freedom, greater emancipation through education, through technology. We're still a relatively prosperous, open society which is innovative and entrepreneurial in spirit. There's a liberal spirit in a lot of national life. But it seems to be accompanied, which is the bit that's new of course, by a kind of reaction to liberalism or a reaction against liberalism. You can see it in the populist movement north of the border, in the populism of UKIP: a full-frontal rejection of the churn that liberalism brings. I always think that UKIP is appealing to a very, very profound and, in a sense, very understandable hankering for a world which doesn't change, where the perils of globalisation are wished away, where social change is slowed down, where everything from gender to sexuality is put back in a box and a clock is turned back to the 1950s. So we're both more liberal as a society but also seeing a reaction to it, which is creating a polarisation.

THE ECONOMIST: Which is a generational conflict.

MR CLEGG: Which is a generational conflict, absolutely. The only bit where it’s not generational is the rise in identity politics, and nationalism, and the politics of blame and division and you see it in the SNP, you see it in Plaid. And that's not necessarily generational, but in my view it's still quite illiberal because it seeks to divide communities and divide communities on a very aggressive assertion about identity. British politics is fragmenting just as much as British society is fragmenting but it doesn't mean that liberal elements are not still very strong. I think it would be an absolute tragedy if the modern day harbingers of political liberalism, the Liberal Democrats, were to flounder. Of course I do.

THE ECONOMIST: What's your response to the claim by Richard Reeves and Jeremy Browne who say that the Lib Dems need to be more assertive in their liberalism? That there's too much splitting the difference and not enough positive proposition?

MR CLEGG: I don't buy it for a minute. I don't understand it. I don't really know what it means, to be honest. You don't communicate with people by –isms. They mean nothing to most of our fellow citizens. They want to know what the spirit of liberalism is in ways they can touch and see and feel.

THE ECONOMIST: Thank you.