Nick Clegg's Tory past

Nick Clegg was in the same Cambridge college as I (Robinson), in the year below me, and almost needless to say I have taken a number of calls in recent days looking for secrets from the past.

Nick was and is a good guy, and actually I don't have any secrets of past behavioural indiscretions anyway. My only real recollection of him was that he was a member of the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA). Robinson was a small college, and not very sympathetic to the Conservatives, and CUCA only had around 40 members in a College of around 300 undergraduates.

I checked my membership records, which I show opposite. I was the Chairman of CUCA in the Lent Term 1988.

Please bear with me, as I take you through the details, neccessary as Nick is denying having been a member.

The records I attach above are those from the year 1986 - 1987, when I was a second year (listed) and amongst the first years was one "N Clegg". The "A" after his name meant he had paid an annual subscription. Most members joined for life; it was a better deal, and I recall the fees were something like £2 for a year's membership and £3 for life. The handwritten annotations on the list actually come partly from one of that year's internal CUCA elections (Easter Term 1987), when I was running for Registrar of CUCA (the arrows and crosses), where I was relying (the arrow) on Nick's support. The thicker black lines were from an election the following year in 1987-88, where, in my writing, I have crossed off all of the previous year's 3rd years (as they were no longer there) and anyone who had only joined for the one year and not renewed - hence the thicker black ink line through the name of "N Clegg".

So I am certain that Nick Clegg was a member of CUCA, only for his first year, 1986 - 1987. For the avoidance of any doubt, there was only one "N Clegg" at Robinson College - you can see him opposite, listed in the "Robinson College Record", under "Freshmen 1986".

There's nothing to be ashamed of in having been a member of CUCA. You could be a member without becoming a member of the Conservative Party. Interestingly, having checked with the then Chair of the Cambridge University SDP and the Chair of the Cambridge University Liberals, they have no recollection of a Nick Clegg, so it seems he showed interest in only the Conservatives at the time.

This wouldn't normally matter much - after all, I was 20, and he was 19, and this is 20 or more years ago. But imagine my surprise when Jonathan Isaby of the Daily Telegraph took an interest in the matter, and has run it in today's paper's "Three Line Whip" column here. Clegg's spokesman says "Nick is one hundred per cent adamant that this isn't true." You can make up your own mind, using the documents above. There was only one Nick Clegg at Robinson College, and Nick Clegg was a member of CUCA.

During the recent Lib Dem leadership race, Chris Huhne alleged that Nick had a Conservative past, which was also flatly denied by Nick's people. If I were Nick, I would come clean about it - it is long ago - and move on.

Comments

[Ay Up]

Nice work Greg!

Cameron should make a spectacle of offering him a shadcab position.

[Guido Fawkes]

He was only a member because the Tory girls were prettier.

[top of the shot]

No surprise to me that he is denying being a member. Those of us who have campaigned against the Lib Dems know

1. They say one thing in one area and the opposite in another.

2. It is easy to tell when a Lib Dem lies, they open their mouths!

[Old Robinsonian]

Aargh, a youthful indiscretion revealed on paper!

I don't remember Clegg at all, Greg.

Obviously did not make the same impact as the colourful young Mr Hands.

[YMT]

Busted! lol, His denials only make him more laughable.

[Alan S]

His denials not the Tory membership are the politically damaging thing.

[Ali T]

Well done Greg. Of course the big question now is if he won’t tell the truth about his membership of the CUCA what else won’t he tell the truth about?

Completely agree with ‘top of the shot’ you just can’t trust the Lib Dems on anything, just look at the Lisbon Treaty when these spineless wonders apparently abstained on principle after their pathetic walk out.

They really are a complete shower.

[eugene]

Who cares who one supported once upon a time...I was a convinced Marxist at University and spent my time throwing rocks at the police....in South Africa mind you...not in England! :)

Now I am Tory through and through.

[David Bullingdon]

Isn't a Conservative Party membership list confidential information? Should it be published like this?

A lot of people would not want their membership of the Conservative Party or it's associate organisations made public.

[Ali T]

Eugene - You are right its not about ones past association with YCs, CF or similar, its the fact that Cleggover is trying to deny it. It's about honesty and trustworthiness at the end of the day.

[alexq]

To be fair, and I am not that keen on LibDems in general, when I was at Cambridge I knew several people who belonged to CUCA who weren't Conservative supporters, and even some who were paid up members of CUCA, CULS (Labour Students) *AND* the LibDems (can't remember what they were called).

The reason was simple: the Tories were in power throughout the eighties and most of the nineties, and there were many Cambridge alumni in the Cabinet. But if you were generally interested in politics and wanted to hear these senior Cabinet ministers when they came up to, you had to join CUCA to get in to the speaker meeting.

[Old CUCA hack]

Just wanted to second what AlexQ says about CUCA membership in the 1980s and early 90s. Other reasons to join included the social events, some of which were engagingly debauched occasions, or being pressured to join in order to vote for a particular candidate or 'slate'.

In other words membership of CUCA meant precisely nothing in terms of party affiliation, ideological orientation and so forth. In fact I distinctly remember that most of the prominent university Liberal and SDP organisers were CUCA members. There was no secret about any of this.

As others have said, anyway, what does it matter? It is easy to think of several Cambridge students of Clegg's generation who have gone on to become very prominent in public life - almost none of them in ways that would have been easy to predict in the late 1980s.

Clegg must know all this. The obvious thing to do would, as Greg put it, to have admitted CUCA membership, put it in context, and then moved on. The fact that Clegg did precisely the opposite speaks volumes about both his character and his effectiveness.

[Cambridge Libertarian]

There wasn't much sensuality on the student left in the 1980s. Wimmin students were hairy all over, wore dungarees and thought every man was a potential rapist. Even if they could have been good looking they grunged down and made themselves as plain and ugly as possible - which was just what the leftist guys of the time deserved.

As Guido said FCS girls were pretty, fun, game and would cook you dinner first. They are probably the reason a mammy's boy like Clegg has clocked up a respectable number.

[Deputy Editor]

The Guardian's Andrew Sparrow has a good opening paragraph on this:

"Nick Clegg did not seem to mind telling Piers Morgan that he had slept with "no more than 30" women. But owning up to having been a member of the Conservative party? Some secrets are apparently just too shameful..."

[RMA]

The fact that Clegg lied about his membership does not justify breaking the data protection act by publishing the names of everyone on the list.
This is not the correct way to expose him. Unless permission was given by everyone on that list to have their names published, they should have been blacked out.

[RMA]

The fact that Clegg lied about his membership does not justify breaking the data protection act by publishing the names of everyone on the list.
This is not the correct way to expose him. Unless permission was given by everyone on that list to have their names published, they should have been blacked out.

[StevenAdams]

I agree with much of the above - it's not that he was a member, it's that his judgment tells him the best course of action here is to 'deny everything'... the best course of action in the Europe debate was to 'whip a mass abstention'... the best course of action when questioned on private matters is to 'make himself sound like a smug never-gonna-be Casanova'...

Frankly, it's not each individual action that hurts him, it's what they say about his judgment. One woeful party leader, that Clegg. Woeful.

Hurrah!

[Hardcore Conservative]

Rumour also has it that Mr Cameron was a Tory once.

[StevenAdams]

what a silly thing to say.

[Charlie]

Two party leaders, two university denials.

So Clegg denies being a Tory at uni and Cameron denies being a cokehead.

Look forward to an equally unscrupulous LibDem at uni with Dave digging out some old evidence.

[Hardcore Conservative]

“what a silly thing to say”.

Is it? I like many in this party have given Mr Cameron support and the benefit of the doubt, and I have done so on this site regarding things such as his engagement with the public services. It is not, however, unqualified slavish support.

On the whole I think that he has got many things right but by embracing values more reminiscent of the Labour Party in the days when it really cared and was respectable.
That was a long time ago I grant you.

If this is what it takes to make the Conservative Party electable again and rescue the country fair enough I suppose, but no amount of glossing over can disguise the fact that the current leadership has more in common with NuLabour methodology than conservative methodology.

This party is probably now more BluLabour than many people can bring themselves to admit. I suspect that Mr Cameron is no more a Tory than Mr Blair was a dyed in the wool card carrying socialist.

[Stefan]

Look at all those CUCA members in Robinson - in my time (2004-7), there were only about four or five in the whole college!

[Igirisu Jin]

Hardcore Conservative, like you said, the Party needs to be electable.. Unfortunately we live in a time when a good country is less important to people that a quick bribe. Just as the Labour government are full of lazy idiots, so is the public. When you have a country that has become so full of scum to the point where what matters most to most people is something for nothing, it is very hard to bring a right-wing party to power. The wrong-wing has brought the UK to its knees and actively encourages lack of responsibility. When the Torys are back in power, we need to massively re-educate the population, fix the influx of foreign socialists, reverse the liberalisation of the judges, and end the corruption of the socialist public owned media. But to do that, we need a landslide.. That means giving people what they want rather than what they need for a little while.