Lib Dem leader Clegg’s son asks him why he’s so unpopular
April 7th, 2011 - 6:15 pm ICT by ANI
London, Apr. 7 (ANI): Liberal Democratic Party leader and Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has revealed that he often ‘cries regularly to music’ and admitted that the vitriolic criticism levelled at him has left its mark
Clegg also said that his young son has asked him why he is so unpopular.
In an extraordinarily candid interview to the Left-wing New Statesman magazine, Clegg told socialite Jemima Khan that he worries about how attacks on him are affecting his family.
‘What I am doing in my work impacts on them emotionally, because my nine-year-old [Antonio] is starting to sense things and I’m having to explain things. Like he asks, “Why are the students angry with you, Papa?”‘ he said.
In the interview, the Daily Mail quotes Clegg as saying that he and Prime Minister David Cameron - whom he referred to as Dave - are not ‘mates’ and revealed he does not want to be in politics for his entire career.
‘I think that’s deeply unhealthy,’ he said. ‘I look at those people that got into politics when they were 16 and are still at it in their late 60s and think, “My heavens above!”‘
Clegg said, after politics, he hopes to go into education.
He singled out Labour leader Ed Miliband - who has called him a ‘tragic figure’ - for making personal attacks on him.
Clegg said he considered Miliband a ‘perfectly nice guy’ but said it was obvious that he was not in control of his own party and so sought to keep his troops happy by ‘ranting and raving at me’.
However, he conceded that he had been hurt by attacks on him since he joined the Government, in particular over his U-turn on university tuition fees.
In one incident, dog excrement was shoved through his door and he has been spat at in the street. ‘I’m a human being, I’m not a punch bag - I’ve of course got feelings,’ Clegg said.
Clegg insisted many members of the public express support for him, but often whisper their congratulations, ‘as if it’s a guilty secret saying anything nice about Nick Clegg’.
Of his university fees U-turn, he said: ‘I have a rather old-fashioned belief that you’ve got to stand by what you’ve done and take the consequences, good or bad.’
But he claimed that scrapping fees was not, in any case, one of his main manifesto priorities. (ANI)
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