Nick Clegg

She met Clegg's father during a visit to England in 1956, and they married on 1 August 1959.

Clegg is multilingual.

He speaks English, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish.

His background has informed his politics.

He says, "There is simply not a shred of racism in me, as a person whose whole family is formed by flight from persecution, from different people in different generations. It's what I am. It's one of the reasons I am a liberal."

His Dutch mother instilled in him "a degree of scepticism about the entrenched class configurations in British society".

Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born 7 January 1967) is a British media executive and former politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015.

Clegg was educated at two private schools: at Caldicott School in Farnham Royal in South Buckinghamshire, where he was joint Head Prefect in 1980, and later at Westminster School in Central London.

As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he and a friend drunkenly set fire to what he called "the leading collection of cacti in Germany".

When news of the incident was reported during his time as Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesperson, Clegg said he was "not proud" of it.

He was arrested and not formally charged, but performed a type of community service.

Clegg spent a gap year working as a skiing instructor in Austria, before going on to Cambridge in 1986, where he studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Robinson College.

He was active in the student theatre, acting in a production of The Normal Heart under the director Sam Mendes.

He was also captain of his college's tennis team, and campaigned for the human rights organisation Survival International.

It has been alleged that Clegg joined the Cambridge University Conservative Association between 1986 and 1987.

Clegg has maintained he has "no recollection of that whatsoever".

Clegg spent the summer of 1989 as an office junior in Postipankki bank in Helsinki.

He worked as a journalist for the Financial Times before becoming a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 1999.

He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Hallam from 2005 to 2017.

An "Orange Book" liberal, he has been associated with both socially liberal and economically liberal policies.

After his election to the House of Commons in 2005, Clegg served in a variety of leadership roles in the Liberal Democrats, most notably as spokesperson for Home Affairs, before being elected to succeed Menzies Campbell as party leader in 2007.

During his tenure as leader, Clegg said that the Liberal Democrats had transcended left and right-wing politics and described the party as radical centrist.

He supported reduced taxes, electoral reform, cuts on defence spending and an increased focus on environmental issues.

Through this Russian connection, Clegg is distantly related to Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2008 to 2011.

His English grandfather was Hugh Anthony Clegg, editor of the British Medical Journal for 35 years.

Clegg's mother is Dutch and was interned, along with her family, by the Japanese military in Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) during the Second World War.

As a result of the 2010 general election, Clegg's Liberal Democrats found themselves with 57 seats in the House of Commons.

The Conservative Party, which failed to receive a majority, formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and Clegg was appointed by David Cameron to serve as his Deputy Prime Minister.

In this capacity, he became the first leader of the Liberal Democrats to answer for the Prime Minister's Questions, and used his influence in the position to pass the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

Controversy arose during this time surrounding the Liberal Democrats' decision to abandon their pledge to oppose increases in tuition fees, which had previously been a key issue that won the party support from students.

During the party's time in coalition, the Liberal Democrats saw a significant drop in support, and the 2015 general election left the party with just 8 seats, which resulted in Clegg's ousting as Deputy Prime Minister and his resignation as party leader.

In 2016, following a referendum in which a majority supported leaving the European Union, Clegg returned to the Liberal Democrat frontbench, concurrently serving as Spokesperson for Exiting the European Union and for International Trade from July 2016 to June 2017.

In the 2017 general election, Clegg was defeated in his constituency of Sheffield Hallam by Jared O'Mara of the Labour Party.

In 2018, Clegg became vicepresident of global affairs and communications at Facebook, Inc. (renamed Meta Platforms in 2021), before being promoted in 2022 to president for global affairs.

Born in Buckinghamshire, Clegg was educated at Westminster School before going on to study at the University of Cambridge, University of Minnesota and College of Europe.

After losing his seat, Clegg moved to the United States after he was appointed by Mark Zuckerberg as Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications of Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms, Inc.) in 2018.

In February 2022, Clegg was promoted by Zuckerberg to President for Global Affairs at Meta Platforms.

Clegg was born in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, the third of four children of Hermance van den Wall Bake and Nicholas Peter Clegg, chairman of United Trust Bank and a former trustee of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation (where Ken Clarke was an adviser).

Clegg has one-quarter Baltic-German ancestry.

His paternal grandmother, Baroness Kira von Engelhardt, of Smolensk, was a Baltic-German noblewoman, niece of Moura Budberg, adventuress and suspected double agent, and the granddaughter of attorney general of the Imperial Russian Senate, Ignatiy Platonovich Zakrevsky.