Nick Clegg&#39;s crucial week: tears, gaffes and a show of strength

The Lib Dem leader has started to publicly demonstrate that he stands up to the PM, writes Nicholas Watt

David Cameron and Nick Clegg recently had a sharp exchange when the prime minister blocked Sir Menzies Campbell from sitting on a commission that will review the work of the European court of human rights.

Fine, said Clegg. But he too would wield a veto and block Cameron's candidate, his mentor the former Tory leader Michael Howard.

The standoff between the leaders of the coalition's two parties shows that their relationship is more complex than the caricature of a head boy and a prefect eager to please his senior partner.

In recent weeks Clegg has found his feet and is starting to show in public what he has always claimed in private ? that he stands up to Cameron. Even Clegg's critics within the party have noticed after the Lib Dems played an instrumental role this week in forcing the government to "pause" the government's health reforms. Evan Harris, the former Lib Dem MP who led the charge against the reforms at the party's spring conference, said: "This was a real boost for Nick in showing that the Liberal Democrats are not a pushover."

As Clegg prepares to take aim at Cameron in a speech on electoral reform in London on Saturday, Lib Dems acknowledge that they have just experienced one of their most significant weeks since the coalition was formed in May. As ever with the Lib Dems, the picture is mixed.

On the upside they can claim to have called a temporary halt to health reforms that had prompted claims that Lib Dems had colluded in the backdoor privatisation of the NHS. On the downside, the Lib Dems are battling suspicions that the two-month NHS "listening exercise" may be no more than PR. In the week that the government spending cuts start to bite they are also led by a man who has taken the art of political gaffes to a new high.

Clegg showed once again that neither he nor his advisers have learnt about the need to carry out due diligence on a politician's own track record before making a policy announcement. So a substantive idea ? to try to open up internships to students from all backgrounds ? was overshadowed this week when Labour pointed out the deputy prime minister once benefited from work experience at a Finnish bank organised by his father.

An attempt to show Clegg's human side, when he admitted to Jemima Khan in the New Statesman that he cried to music and his nine-year-old son asked why students were angry with "papa", left party figures almost in tears themselves. "Nick's great strength ? his honesty ? is also a tremendous weakness when he looks self-pitying," one source said. But senior Lib Dems were astonished by a throwaway remark in the interview which attracted little attention.

Clegg attempted to play down the defining moment of the Lib Dems' experience in coalition so far ? the U-turn over university tuition fees ? by saying he had not made much of an issue of the policy during the election. "I didn't even spend that much time campaigning on tuition fees," he told Khan. Clegg's remarks left senior party figures spluttering. "Nick could talk of nothing else during the campaign," one said. "Yes he did try to downgrade our commitment to scrap tuition fees in the year before the general election. But when Charles Kennedy fought that off, Nick then did an about-turn and made it the defining issue of the campaign. His office pretty much ordered candidates to sign that famous pledge to vote against an increase in tuition fees."

Senior party figures hope Clegg will not make such mistakes in future if he grows in confidence as the Lib Dems show that they can make a difference on health reforms. This will become ever more urgent if Clegg suffers his biggest setback of all ? losing the AV referendum on 5 May.

Clegg's weaknesses until now stem, friends say, from his closeness to Cameron in the first few months of the coalition. This arose out of the need to show that the coalition could function properly and that the Lib Dems were worthy of government after a gap of more than 60 years.

The party leadership believes these two tests have now been passed, giving Clegg more room to hail Lib Dem achievements in government and a chance to show he is not a house guest of the Tories but a joint ? though not equal ? tenant. One Clegg ally said: "This is not a Conservative government propped up by the Lib Dems. It is a coalition government where the Lib Dem voice is strong, just as the Conservative voice is strong."

The first test of the new, more confident Clegg will come when the "listening exercise" on the NHS reforms ends at the beginning of June, a month after the AV referendum. By then Clegg will either be in the doldrums, after flunking the best opportunity in a generation to reform Britain's voting system, or he will be hailed as the greatest Liberal reformer since the war if he wins.

The need for success on the NHS will be acute because the cuts, based on the Lib Dems' tough deficit stance pushed by the former left-leaning SDP economist Chris Huhne, will be biting by the summer. Evan Harris is confident that real change will be made, though not because the Tories have gone soft.

"It can't be a PR exercise because it will be exposed and then opposed," said Harris. "You have amendments to the bill or you don't. People like me will either be satisfied or we're not and I'm not a pushover. You won't get Liberal Democrat MPs voting for something that is against the terms of that motion [rejecting the reforms at the party's spring conference]."

A new, tougher Clegg has yet to show its face. But in private he is said to be showing guts. At a recent lunch at Chevening, the Kent country house at Clegg's disposal, the deputy prime minister ventured outside to share a fag with the most charming but fearsome figure in the party: Menzies Campbell's wife, Elspeth.

Nicholas Watt

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