When Nick Clegg's campaign bus pulls into De Montfort University, in Leicester South, even his aides, who must fast be becoming used to the unprecedented, are surprised. It's the day after the final leaders' debate, and the crowd stretches out into the morning sunshine and leans out of the windows; the fact that some of them carry Vote Labour placards somehow just makes it more of an event. "That's what you call momentum, I think," says his spin doctor, drily.
Clegg, who has been sitting at the back of the bus, discussing the finer points of SDP-Liberal history, takes a moment to collect himself. "When did I first start campaigning in Leicester South?" he says, to her, but almost under his breath. "When was I MEP? How long do you think I can perorate for?" He stands, puts his jacket on, and straightens his shoulders, as she talks him through it, sotto voce. Snatches come through – "I've done the TV debates. Now it's over to you."
He steps out of the bus. A cheer goes up, and he's immediately surrounded. "Oh!" A blonde girl runs past, breathlessly, holding a camera up as if she was at a gig. "Let's try to get near him so we can kiss him on the cheek!" says another girl, in an outsize straw hat. A couple more students hold up a placard that reads: "Will You Come 4 A Pint". "I am so excited to be out of the TV studios …"begins Clegg. "Weyhey!" goes the crowd. It's nothing to do with him, this time, but, with a certain dramatic finesse, one of the Labour placards falling down.
When he makes his way back on to the bus, a good 45 minutes later, he has answered questions about tax, banks and Afghanistan, refused a cupcake (he was worried it might be laced with intoxicants), accepted a garland of orange and white flowers, and is worrying about whether he caused offence by not being gracious enough about it. He takes a call from his younger brother in Vietnam. "We're really close. But he's not interested in politics at all." His parents are a different matter: his father "leaves lengthy voicemail messages on the phone every day, with his latest tips from the top. They're sometimes so lengthy that I literally don't have time to listen to them. They all sort of start with, 'Son, it's your father here.' It's amazing – you're on an election campaign and your parents still think they can tell you what to do." His voice is fond.
Earlier, in the back of the crowded bus, observed by the smiling eyes of Clegg himself, we had wanted to know whether his sudden catapulting into contender status felt in any way unearned – after all, the public has been so desperate for an alternative, any alternative, that anyone taking that third place on the podium in Manchester would have got the same reaction. It isn't necessarily about him, or what he stands for.
"That's a little harsh and a little unfair." He seems genuinely affronted. Clegg is slighter in person than he seems on screen, boyish, with a slight paunch. Perhaps because he has never been part of a party used to power, or because he has only been leader for three years – and an often ignored leader at that – he still takes the trouble to persuade: he makes eye contact, follows the effect of his words. Most of the time, in fact, he seems to be holding an actual conversation, rather than reaching for a toolbox of phrases. "I don't think it's just because I popped up on TV [that] there has been this quite dramatic change. I like to think it's because of what I've been saying. People are enjoying the idea that they have more choice than they ever thought they had. Of course, there's an, 'Ooh look', I agree with that. But by Saturday morning you'd expect the polls would have gone down and they haven't. I like to think it's a combination of novelty and substance."
There is a harried air of rearguard discovery to what we know about Nick Clegg. Unlike David Cameron and Gordon Brown, with whom it's possible to refer, en passant, to Bullingdon Club shenanigans, or a rugby injury, or a manse, and for nearly everyone to know what that might mean, all most people knew about Clegg (if they could name the leader of the Liberal Democrats at all) was perhaps that he had some European connections, though they weren't sure what, and maybe that he once told Piers Morgan he'd had 30 lovers (in fact, asked by Morgan whether he had slept with 30 women, Clegg replied: "It's a lot less than that" – not that that got in the way of a good story.)
Since then we have learned rather more, much of it courtesy of the rightwing press, who – once they'd got over the headline-writers' glee of noticing that, briefly, he was the most popular candidate since Churchill – accused him of Nazi slurs on Britain, having political donations paid into his private bank accounts, nudge-nudge-wink-winked about his ancestry – Russian! (his paternal grandmother fled the revolution.) Dutch (his mother)! A Spanish wife! Children with Spanish names! An un-English ability to speak more than one language! And just loved the fact that he has a spin doctor called, as the sketch-writer for the Daily Mail put it a couple of days ago, "Fraulein Lena, whose surname is Pietsch, pronounced Peach! Blonde, she is rather strict and was wearing long black boots and a black macintosh (belted, with the collar raised)."
None of it has been pleasant to watch, and has presumably been even less pleasant for him, his family, and his campaign team to endure, but it has also been so extremely party political than no less a person than Peter Mandelson waded in to call the coverage "frankly disgusting" (cue much reading of tea leaves as to how he might lean after the election).
But there are other things to ask of the man who looks like he might hold the balance of power in the next parliament. His predecessor, Paddy Ashdown, has described him as having moved the Liberal Democrats "to what you might call the right … The liberalism of the old Liberal party was a comfortable social liberalism, which didn't take into account economic liberty as well as social liberty. Nick has moved the party quite a long way in that regard."
"Has he?" Clegg looks momentarily nonplussed. Shall we get him on the phone now? "I've already spoken to him twice already this morning. I'm quite surprised he would have said it in those terms. But anyway … well, I think in a sense … I hope my record speaks for itself, which is to sharpen the progressive liberal agenda in the Liberal Democrats. If you look at [our policies on tax] I don't think that's right or left, it's based on a very simple principle that a tax system should reward hard work, should have a tax burden which rests lighter on people at the bottom and heavier on people at the top. It should be simple and transparent – that's a very liberal progressive agenda. I believe that there is the liberal heritage and tradition which is a really great one. It goes right back to the 18th-century and is a philosophy that believes in the primacy of the individual, that power should be dispersed. And that is different to a collectivism."
Clegg has suggested the NHS be "broken up" by, for example, scrapping strategic health authorities to save money; supports, in his manifesto, opening schools up to competition; and has said, to the Spectator: "I'm 43 now. I was at university at the height of the Thatcher revolution and I recognise now something I did not at the time: that her victory over a vested interest, the trade unions, was immensely significant."
"I've got nothing against trade unions," he says now. "I've got a lot of friends in the trade unions, but I just don't think that's right in a liberal democracy to have parties which are basically there to represent one vested interest over others. That's why I always get a bit nonplussed by the right/left stuff. Of course I understand – to be fantastically pretentious, I remember from my days as a social anthropology student, the structuralism and the work of Levi Strauss: our brains always divides things in two. Well, maybe we do, divide things in two but I'd like to think we can divide things in three."
He bridles a little at suggestions that, in all other ways, he has had quite an easy ride, but he does not deny it. Clegg, the third of four children, two more boys and a girl who, he says, "is the bohemian one of the family – she's married to an artist, works in a local printing company, has chickens and is the most lovely woman in the world" – grew up in Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire; his parents also own a 10-bedroom chateau in France and a large ski chalet in the Swiss Alps. His father was a successful and, as Clegg has repeatedly insisted, "radical" banker, who is all for the Liberal Democrats' idea of breaking up the banks. This is the side of the family that boasts, rather thrillingly, Moura Budberg – sometime lover of Maxim Gorky, HG Wells and Robert Bruce Lockhart – and a suspected double agent. He has spoken of meeting her when he was a child: "She was a pretty imposing figure. She would sit there almost as if she was on a throne. I remember her once saying to me, in a thick Russian accent, 'Speak up, boy! You mumble, you mumble!'"
Clegg's mother is Dutch, and arrived in England after a spell in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He traces both his sense of gratefulness for English civility and tolerance and – somewhat more tenuously – a sense of social injustice back to her. "She's very typical of a very strong, Low Church progressive tradition, which abhors flashiness and abhors waste and thinks that if you do well you should be rewarded, but you shouldn't flaunt it, and taught all four of us, from a very, very young age, that compassion is really important – you shouldn't be prejudiced because of the way that people speak, or look. There's a very strong ethos in my family, which is in a sense very – I can't think of a better word – open-hearted, and very progressive and driven by very strong values. My dad too, of course, but my mum really instilled those values."
Clegg says that when he first arrived at Westminster school, in central London, he felt – "you know, 'Chinese peasant enters city'. I felt extraordinarily out of place, because I grew up in the countryside. I felt very parochial by comparison. But I quickly felt very, very free." Westminster, where he made friends with Marcel and Louis Theroux (who recently claimed to have been his fag, but wasn't, apparently), was followed by Cambridge, where he acted with Helena Bonham-Carter and Sam Mendes, a who's who that reads much more in his favour than the various plutocrats-in-the making of the Bullingdon Club.
There has been some joy, too, at his hints of a hinterland: when he spent a year doing an MA in Minneapolis he "religiously" went to every Prince concert he could get to; he recently chose, as his favourite music, Schubert's Erlkönig and Impromptu in E-flat minor, Strauss's Four Last Songs and Chopin's Waltz in A-minor and has admitted to occasionally crying when he listens to music in his car.
He has managed, so far, to draw a wobbly line between himself and the way in which Cameron is often drawn; to portray himself as relatively normal. But aren't they both – to many people, not just the poorest, but definitely to them – almost alien, because they are beneficiaries of such unreachable luck and privilege? Might these people not be justified in thinking that, if the Tories and the Liberal Democrats split the government up between them, there will be no one to understand and speak for them?
"The way I look at it is this. I am who I am. I've never sought to deny who I am, it's absurd. I'm comfortable in my own skin, I'm proud of everything I've done, I'm not the slightest bit ashamed of who I am. I'm acutely aware that I've been very lucky, but you know, I'm not going to try and bury my past.
"But combined with that, I've also been brought up with values which are driven by compassion, driven by a sense of urgency about how everyone is treated. Surely one of the things that makes us unusual as human beings is that you're not a prisoner of your own experience – you can also have the ability to reach out to other people.
"I think it's worth taking you through what a Conservative government will look like: a Conservative government would cast the country adrift from the world. You'll see no reform of our clapped out political system; you'll see a continued haemorraghing of public trust. You'll see a sense of north-south divide; class divide and growing inequality. And it will be a country very disillusioned, with leaders who only have a culture of entitlement but very little sense of mission. In a sense I want to make a very simple appeal. We have a better purpose than that. Look at some of our detail on fairness, social mobility, a new income tax allowance, really resettling the basic perceptions of how we run a sustainable economy. In all these ways, we are now setting the agenda. At the end of the day, politics is a battle of ideas. We, I think, have now definitely won the battle in terms of which party is fighting for progressive politics in Britain."
