Education
Clegg was educated at two independent schools: at Caldicott School in Farnham Royal in South Buckinghamshire, where he was joint Head Prefect in 1980, and later at Westminster School in Central London. As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he and a friend drunkenly set fire to what he called "the leading collection of cacti in Germany". When news of the incident was reported during his time as Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Clegg said he had behaved "appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally", and that he was "not proud" of it. He was arrested but not formally charged, but performed a kind of community service.
He spent a gap year working as a skiing instructor in Austria, before going on to Cambridge University in 1986, where he studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Robinson College. He was active in the student theatre at Cambridge, acting alongside Helena Bonham Carter in a play about AIDS under director Sam Mendes. He was also captain of his college's tennis team, and campaigned for the human rights organisation Survival International. Clegg spent the summer of 1989 as an office junior in Postipankki bank in Helsinki.
It has been alleged that Clegg joined the Cambridge University Conservative Association between 1986 and 1987. However Clegg has maintained he has "no recollection of that whatsoever" of joining the association.
After university, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a year at the University of Minnesota, where he wrote a thesis on the political philosophy of the Deep Green movement. He then moved to New York City, where he worked as an intern under Christopher Hitchens at The Nation, a progressive liberal magazine, where he fact checked Hitchens' articles.
Clegg next moved to Brussels, where he worked alongside Guy Spier for six months as a trainee in the G24 co-ordination unit which delivered aid to the countries of the former Soviet Union. After the internship he took a second master's degree at the College of Europe in Bruges, a university for European studies in Belgium, where he met his wife, Miriam González Durántez, a lawyer and the daughter of a Spanish senator. Nick Clegg is an alumnus of the "Mozart Promotion" (1991–92) of the College of Europe.
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