Nick Clegg

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it’s completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

What I hope is in five years’ time, I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked, but it has worked.

I have got instincts that, I think, are very much in tune with people’s very keen sense to see something different. I did not dream of being in politics since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I was not involved in student politics, or not in that partisan way.

Politics is a highly tribal business.

I didn’t become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It’s not the be all and end all for us. There are other very, very key ambitions in politics, not least social mobility and life chances, that I care about as passionately if not more.

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It’s highly, highly polarised. It’s right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

One of the big changes in politics has been because families, individuals, have felt worried, insecure… worried about the economy, worried about their jobs, worried about their kids’ futures… actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people’s everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.

One thing I have frankly decided is that when it comes to political reform we have two conservative parties in British politics. Both the Labour and Conservative parties have constantly and repeatedly failed to honour promises they have made about reforming, cleaning, modernising our clapped-out system.