Knighthood for Clegg
New Year gong for former Lib Dem leader (and non-stop Bremoaner)
NICK Clegg will be handed a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours.
The former Liberal Democrat leader will become ‘Sir Nick’ when the full list is published on Saturday, senior party sources revealed.
The gong is in recognition of his five years as David Cameron’s deputy prime minister.
But the knighthood is likely to be controversial given that Mr Clegg is an arch Remainer and that his party has been showered with honours in recent years.
The Lib Dems have more than 100 representatives in the House of Lords despite their limited electoral success.
Their peers will have considerable power over the course of the UK’s departure from the EU and Mr Clegg has called for a second referendum and written a book called How to Stop Brexit.
Senior Lib Dem figures to have received knighthoods include party leader Vince Cable and home affairs spokesman Ed Davey. They were knighted after serving in the coalition government’s Cabinet. Both lost their south-west London seats at the 2015 election but returned to Parliament after winning again at this summer’s poll.
Another former Lib Dem Cabinet minister, Danny Alexander, was given a knighthood after losing his Scottish seat in 2015, although he has not returned as an MP. Former pensions minister Steve Webb was knighted a year ago. Mr Clegg, who lost his Sheffield Hallam seat in June, had to wait longer. It is likely that – as with his former colleagues – his honour was delayed until after he left the Commons.
In his book on Brexit, Mr Clegg wrote: ‘There is nothing remotely inevitable about Brexit – except that it will be deeply damaging if it happens.’
The former Lib Dem leader sparked further fury among Eurosceptics when he travelled to Brussels to meet EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier. He and two other Remain supporters, veteran Tory Ken Clarke, and Labour peer Lord Adonis, were accused of trying to interfere in Brexit talks.
Mr Clegg has called for Britain to hold a second referendum on the
‘Reneged on tuition fees’
final Brexit deal agreed with Brussels. In September, he said there should be a second vote because the people who voted Leave were dying off. He said the ‘high point’ of support had passed because ‘ the oldest voters voted for Brexit in the largest numbers’.
Mr Clegg said MPs were ‘ duty bound’ to reject any Brexit deal if it was not good enough. He said he supported Britain joining an ‘outer orbit of membership within a reformed European Union’.
Mr Clegg entered the Commons in 2005 after years working in Brussels. He took up a post with the European Commission in 1994 and five years later he was elected as a Liberal Democrat MEP in the European Parliament.
After swapping Brussels for Westminster, he won the race to become party leader in 2007 by beating Chris Huhne after Menzies Campbell was persuaded to step down.
Three years later he rode a wave of so-called ‘Cleggmania’ that briefly saw his party top the polls during the 2010 election campaign.
Although the results did not match this early success, he became a power broker during coalition talks, eventually siding with the Tories and allowing David Cameron to enter No 10. In return, Mr Clegg was handed the position of deputy prime minister and brought the first Liberal MPs into government for decades. However, his party’s poll ratings began to plummet after he was forced to renege on a major pledge not to increase tuition fees.
And he suffered the humiliation of losing a referendum on changing the voting system to a form of proportional representation.
After the party’s 2015 election disaster, Mr Clegg resigned as leader and returned to the backbenches.
A year later, following the EU referendum, he became the party’s Brexit spokesman.
The honours system has come under attack in recent years over claims it is used to give gongs to political cronies. The honours will be announced formally on the night of December 29.
A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: ‘We don’t comment on any honours list speculation.’
IT was of course inevitable that Nick Clegg, as a former deputy prime minister, would eventually be awarded a knighthood.
His predecessor as Liberal Democrat leader received one, as did some more obscure members of his Parliamentary party, such as Ed Davey and Steve Webb.
But what did Mr Clegg actually do to deserve what remains a coveted accolade – one that is meant only for those who have performed exceptional service to the nation.
It’s unlikely that his stewardship of the Lib Dems is being rewarded. When Mr Clegg took over in 2007, they had more than 50 Commons seats. By the time he was ignominiously dumped by the voters at the last general election, that number had slumped to just 12.
And surely it couldn’t be for his time as a member of the Coalition, when he reneged on an agreement to back boundary changes that would have ushered in a fairer electoral system and broke a solemn promise not to increase university tuition fees.
It certainly can’t be for services to democracy. An arch-Remainer and slavish Europhile, Mr Clegg has been working furiously to overturn the referendum result – showing a candid disdain for the will of the people. He has even published a book entitled How To Stop Brexit.
The ineluctable truth is that Mr Clegg is receiving his knighthood under the principle of Buggins’ turn. Apart from a brief flash of popularity during the 2010 election campaign (before people knew what he was like) his career has often been punctuated by failure. But like so many mediocre politicians and civil servants before him, he gets the honour anyway.
Ironically, he once presented himself as an insurgent – a radical alternative to the old politics. In fact, he’s the embodiment of the entitled, self- serving political elite and this knighthood confirms his place at the centre of the Establishment.