Political

Nick Clegg, the New Statesman interview and crying

The latest edition of the New Statesman has an interview with Nick Clegg, which has mostly garnered attention for the shock news that Nick Clegg is a human being and has been known to cry to music:

He is besotted by his “three lovely boys” and is most proud “by a long shot” of the family life he has created with Miriam. They manage to lead a relatively normal life, “not in a bunker in Westminster”, and he tries to pick his children up from school and put them to bed at night at least two or three times a week.

He regrets that sometimes he doesn’t always get the balance right, which makes him “quite miserable” and unable to do his job properly. Sometimes he has to tell them white lies if he is stuck in a meeting. At home, in the evenings, he likes to read novels and says he “cries regularly to music.”

However, there’s also much of substance in the piece, including:

Clegg was a strong opponent of the war in Iraq and for that he earned many supporters. His backing of the “surge” and British forces’ continued presence in Afghan­istan is therefore surprising. There are rumours, which he denies, that he wanted to call for an immediate withdrawal of troops but that the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, an ex-marine, persuaded him not to.

“In a sense,” Clegg says, “we have brought our ambition to a much more realistic level. We’ve now got an exit date, which we didn’t have before, and a much better set of weapons on the ground. And crucially you’ve got the British government saying to [President Hamid] Karzai – who I had dinner with recently – this cannot be won militarily. Once you’re in that far and you’ve had that many people die and be maimed, I think it would be morally questionable to cut and run overnight.”

You can read the full interview with Nick Clegg here.

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