Nick Clegg

Clegg was educated at the private Caldicott School at Farnham Royal in South Buckinghamshire and, later, at the private Westminster School in London. As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, Germany, he was sentenced to a term of community service after he and a friend burned a collection of cacti belonging to a professor. He spent a gap year as a skiing instructor in Austria, Clegg studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and was active in the student theatre; he acted alongside Helena Bonham Carter in a play about AIDS, and under director Sam Mendes. Clegg spent summer 1989 as an office junior in a Postipankki bank in Helsinki. After university, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a year at the University of Minnesota, where he wrote a thesis on the political philosophy of the Deep Green movement. He then moved to New York City, where he worked as an intern under Christopher Hitchens at The Nation, a left-wing magazine. In 1993, Clegg won the Financial Times' David Thomas Prize, in remembrance of an FT journalist killed on assignment in Kuwait in 1991. Clegg was the award's first recipient. He was later sent to Hungary, where he wrote articles about the mass privatisation of industries in the former communist bloc.