Early Life and Family
Clegg was born in 1967 in Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. He is the third of four children of Nicholas Peter Clegg, CBE, the chairman of United Trust Bank, and a former trustee of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation (where Ken Clarke was an adviser). On his father's side of the family Clegg is related to Kira von Engelhardt, daughter of a Russian baron of German, Polish, and Ukrainian origin, Ignaty Zakrevsky, an attorney general of the Imperial Russian senate, the writer Moura Budberg, and his English grandfather Hugh Anthony Clegg, editor of the British Medical Journal for 35 years.
Clegg's Dutch mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, was interned, along with her family, by the Japanese military in Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) during World War Two. She met Clegg's father during a visit to England in 1956, and they married on 1 August 1959.
Clegg is multilingual: he speaks English, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish. His background has informed his politics. He says, "There is simply not a shred of racism in me, as a person whose whole family is formed by flight from persecution, from different people in different generations. It’s what I am. It’s one of the reasons I am a liberal." His Dutch mother instilled in him "a degree of scepticism about the entrenched class configurations in British society".
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