By Chris Bowers
Biteback Publishing, £20

In the introduction to his biography of Nick Clegg, Lib Dem party member Chris Bowers says he hopes that the reader will see the book as “the honest profile I intend it to be”. This reader was, and remains, neither particularly well- or ill-disposed towards Clegg. However, after ploughing through the 300-odd pages of this biography, I am now quite ill-disposed towards Bowers.

Bowers spends the first third of the book putting a positive spin on every aspect of Clegg’s childhood: his childhood arson conviction is dismissed as a “peccadillo”. This wouldn’t be so bad – biographers given generous access are perhaps likely to end up friendly towards their subjects – if the spinning didn’t seem so tenuous and party political.

It’s justifiable for Bowers to present evidence that Clegg is a true Liberal, not the closet Conservative which disaffected Lib Dems see him as. This may have a party political motivation, but also fits with the genre of a political biography.
It sits less easily when Bowers tries to debunk the idea that Clegg is a Cameron-lite, with his affable demeanour and private school/Oxbridge education. Bowers acknowledges that Clegg had an affluent and idyllic childhood, though he does his best to insert drama and trauma into Clegg’s life through stories about his grandparents. He then goes into some detail differentiating Cameron’s schooling from Clegg’s. He may be right to imply Clegg’s Cambridge college is less pretentious than Cameron’s Oxford alma mater; or that his school, Westminster College, is more liberal than Eton. But he’s splitting hairs: these institutions have much more in common with each other than they do with the vast majority of British schools and universities.

I nearly stopped reading the book after a section which seems designed to give Clegg a tragic back story. It begins by saying of the 2010 election campaign that “all three party leaders had sustained brushes with hospital services over the welfare of a child”. Clegg’s son suffered a severe illness as a baby, but thankfully survived. “It was awful,” says Clegg, “but what Gordon Brown and David Cameron went through was a lot worse. Our [experience] was nowhere near that.” Bowers follows this quote with a sentence so crass and needless it made me want to throw this book out of the bus window: “Well, no, but really only because Antonio survived”.
Despite my growing disdain for Bowers as a journalist and biographer, I carried on reading and was rewarded with an interesting overview of recent Lib Dem history; a few insights into the formation of party policy before the election; and an inadvertently revealing account of the tuition fees controversy.

If you’re given a copy of Bowers’ book I’d advise starting to read from chapter nine onwards, and keeping a large pinch of salt nearby at all times. It is possible to learn something from this book, but you’ll need substantial reserves of patience to get there.

review, books, nick clegg

Last updated 231 days ago by Civil Service World