What we should be doing in the EU as a whole is more economic integration in the single market, rather than less.
I’m very lucky. I am one of those people who is able to go home, shut the front door and completely focus on the kids.
When I became leader, I made very clear I was not going to choose the easy life. I have always taken risks. I don’t like comfort-zone politics.
If you scratch below the surface and ask what really makes me tick, it’s the liberalism of trying to promote freedom and opportunity. Promoting social mobility is one of the keys to that.
Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour, and particularly Old Labour, does.
You see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.
We are keen to stress that a strong euro zone is good for a strong United Kingdom. It’s not for us to write the changes that the euro zone needs to embark on.
We need to reach out to small ‘l’ liberal voters who have a modern outlook on life, who want a party that is hard-headed on the economy – more credible on the economy than Labour – but more socially progressive and fairer than the Conservatives.
My dad’s side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There’s an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It’s very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It’s very warm, it’s very up, it’s very down. I would celebrate that.
Nothing will do more damage to the pro-European movement than giving room to the suspicion that we have something to hide, that we do not have the “cojones” to carry our argument to the people.
I think it is a simple statement of principle that in a democracy you should make your MPs work harder for your vote and try and get at least majority support in their local area, and that in a nutshell is what AV does.
Growth that lasts does not threaten our children’s future. It recognises that our planet is a gift that must be cherished. That tomorrow is our responsibility as much as today.
The UK is not going to leave the European Union. Of course not. We are inextricably wound up with Europe. In terms of culture, history and geography, we are a European nation.
Actually, the curious thing is that the more you become a subject of admiration or loathing, the more you’re examined under a microscope, the distance seems to open up between who you really are and the portrayals that people impose on you.
You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It’s highly, highly polarised. It’s right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.
Any government, of whatever composition, needs to mobilise opinion way beyond its own ranks in order to do the difficult things that it does.
I am quite strict as a dad but I don’t want to be censorious.
Although I am a young leader, I actually came to it strangely quite late. I have a different perspective, partly because of my family, partly because of what I did for ten years: negotiating trade deals, working out in Central Asia doing assistance projects.
I think that the days when newspaper barons could basically click their fingers and governments would snap to attention have gone.
Our Sheffield and London homes are worth well over a million but the bank owns most of them – we are mortgaged up to the gills.