Clegg: We will replace Labour on the left
By politics.co.uk staff
Nick Clegg is not looking at a hung parliament, he is looking at walking through the door to Number 10, he has said.
In an interview with the Times the Liberal Democrat leader, whose party is second in most opinion polls, said the election is now a choice between “two competing pitches for change” with liberalism replacing “Labour statism” as the main force in the centre left.
“And I think more and more people in the Labour party are coming to appreciate that. That’s why the big choice now, if not psephologically but intellectually, this is now a two-horse race between the Conservative party and the Lib Dems,” he added.
Talking about his ambitions, Mr Clegg added:”I think the Lib Dems have a brilliant, brilliant team and I would love to see us in government and, of course, I want to be prime minister.
“I honestly wouldn’t have put myself forward and put my family, with everything it implies to have a politician as a husband and a father, if I didn’t genuinely feel that what I believe or what I represent are big changes that would genuinely make a big difference.”
He did say he would like his children to continue to live in Putney and attend the same schools as now.
Whether he takes power or not Mr Clegg says that electoral reform is now a certainty: “Reform is now unavoidable. You can’t duck it.” And he said that it would be a red line of any negotiations between him and David Cameron.
While he said it was “a statement of the bleeding obvious” that Gordon Brown could not continue to “squat” in Number 10 if Labour came third in the polls, he did not rule out working with another Labour leader in coalition, but rather outlined why such a result makes the case for reform.
He said: “I don’t see how the case for reform can be ignored or rejected any more. It seems to me that something that was previously a debate very much in the beltway suddenly becomes very obvious to millions of people as something odd. That’s the system that David Cameron wants to prop up.”
