A slight sense of déjà vu this morning with the Times‘s front page, the headline on which is “Nick Clegg: I want to be prime minister”.
It reminded me a little of the Evening Standard‘s front page a couple of weeks ago that read: “Nick Clegg: I want to be prime minister”.
And, come to think of it, the headline above my interview with Clegg in May 2009, which was — you guessed it — “I want to be prime minister”. Back then, when Clegg said it for the first time, it seemed outlandish, a 100-1 shot at the bookies’. He even said I would laugh at it. From the piece:
“I think Labour has to go into opposition before it reinvents itself,” Clegg tells me. So is he saying Labour will lose? “Yes.” But presumably he isn’t saying the Tories will win. “No! Quite the reverse; I think it is a really exciting time in politics.” Then, for the first time on record, he explicitly sets out the extent of his ambitions: “I mean, look, you’re probably going to chuckle, but — I mean, I want to be prime minister. Not out of some weird sort of vanity, but because there is no point in me being leader of my party unless I want to actually get in a position to change stuff. But I want to change stuff not on the basis of the old rules.”
But — now at 10-1 — the idea is not so impossible to envisage after all.
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