Shared Opinion | 5 April 2008

Nick Clegg’s sex confession shows why politicians should never try to look normal

It was the 14 pints, I always thought, that ultimately did it for William Hague. That was the beginning of the end. There must have been teenagers out there in the 1970s who did, indeed, drink 14 pints a day. It’s just that they probably weren’t the same teenagers who, aged 16, spent their spare time practising a piping address for the Conservative party conference. Hague said he drank 14 pints; Britain thought ‘nah’. Britain thought, ‘Come out to the pub with me, you baldy wee pluke, and I bet you couldn’t handle more than four.’ The problem wasn’t that he was being overly confessional, it was more the opposite. It was a ham-fisted attempt at being confessional about something which it was suddenly evident that he didn’t know all that much about.

And so to Nick Clegg and his sex life.