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.
Politics is a highly tribal business.
Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes.
The caricature of what George Osborne is doing on the fiscal side is absurd. If you read some of the commentary, particularly from the left, you would think he was turning the clock back to the 1930s.
Most of what needs to be changed in the euro zone can be done without treaty changes. The demand for treaty change is as political as it is legal and I don’t think it’s going to happen soon.
I don’t want to clip on the armour every morning. I’ve seen some politicians do this and they get a bit mangled and bitter. I just refuse to do that. I refuse to be angry or bitter or complain, and I remain open. I may sometimes be a bit too open but I’m not going to change that one bit.
I don’t even pretend we can occupy the Lib Dem holier-than-thou, hands-entirely-clean-and-entirely-empty-type stance. No, we are getting our hands dirty, and inevitably and totally understandably we are being accused of being just like any other politicians.
I didn’t become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It’s not the be all and end all for us. There are other very, very key ambitions in politics, not least social mobility and life chances, that I care about as passionately if not more.
I totally accept that it’s a legitimate criticism that when you are involved in the day-to-day scrum of government that what can get lost is the narrative, the hymn sheet the song that inspires and lifts people’s sights.
I am a passionate believer in freedom of speech. I would not support anything which would impinge on aggressive robust freedom of the British press, but when things go wrong and there has been outright illegality, there should be proper accountability.
I don’t lead a particularly Bohemian existence. The main criterion for me is not to be judgemental of other people so long as what they do is not harmful or offensive to others.
I don’t watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I’m reading at the moment ‘Freedom,’ by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I’m loving it.
I have got instincts that, I think, are very much in tune with people’s very keen sense to see something different. I did not dream of being in politics since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I was not involved in student politics, or not in that partisan way.
I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don’t think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.
The Liberal Democrats will add a heart to a Conservative government and a brain to a Labour one.
I’ve just been away for a week, and I dropped my BlackBerry in the sea while I was messing around with the kids, so no one can reach me. Blissful. I heartily recommend it.
We need to teach our kids, because there is such a celebrity culture at the moment, that however rich you are, however famous you are, however glamorous you are, everyone has to live by the same rules.
One thing I’ve very quickly learned is that if you wake up every morning worrying about what’s in the press, you would go completely and utterly potty.
If there’s one thing I’m not going to apologise for as the leader of the Liberal Democrats in government after 60 or 70 years of being out of government, it’s that you just cannot avoid but deal with the world the way it is.
The Liberal Democrat Party and the Conservative Party come at things very differently when it comes to Europe. When it comes to political reform, we have a much greater tradition in the Liberal Democrats of social justice and fairness than the Conservatives do.
David Davis had promised that Britain would be part of a free-trade area ‘almost twice the size of the EU’ within two years of the Brexit vote – a statement outdone in its absurdity only by Mr Davis’ later boast of negotiating a trading area ‘probably ten times the size of the European Union’. Based on GDP, Davis is aiming for something larger than the economies of the entire planet combined.68 So it can’t happen.