Word: clegg
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...infusion of Washington into Westminster doesn't stop there. Dunn, Knapp and Sheehan have all been hired to prepare Cameron and Brown for Britain's first-ever televised debates between party leaders (the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg will also take part). The first will be broadcast live on Thursday. Britons, used to abrasive political debates that routinely see the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition swapping contemptuous jibes while backbenchers heckle gleefully, may notice an American politesse to the TV confrontations. That's because the party leaders agreed to participate only if the broadcasts followed the deferential model...
...approach to Washington. "Blair was too much the new friend telling you everything you want to hear, rather than the best friend telling you what you need to hear," says Conservative chief David Cameron. What America needs is "the candid friend, the best friend." Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg, speaking to TIME in February, was even more outspoken, deploring "this almost unseemly knee-bending allegiance to the White House." (See "Nick Clegg: In the Balance...
...such phrases shock, it's not entirely unintentional. Clegg is trying to cut through the tangle of well-meaning woolliness shrouding a party that traditionally attracts more than its share of affluent supporters in sandals and bicycle clips. In an hour-long town-hall meeting in a key Lib Dem target constituency, he uses the word fair 25 times. "If I hear him say again that a child growing up in one part of [the northern English city] Sheffield has got much better life chances than a child growing up in another part of Sheffield I think I might scream...
That palette includes "greedy bankers" and a warning that debt-ridden Britain is "like an enlarged version of Iceland." There's green too, lots of it, with ambitious proposals for investing in renewable energy and axing any expansion of nuclear power. And some might see red at Clegg's trenchant views on recalibrating Britain's relationship with the U.S. The Lib Dems opposed British participation in the Iraq war, which Clegg ascribes to "this almost unseemly knee-bending allegiance to the White House. I don't think it's good for Britain," he says. "I don't think...
...easy to be high-minded when you're a party leader in no danger of attaining real power. But there's every evidence that Clegg's principles run deep. That matters. The accommodations he makes if Britons return a hung parliament could have an impact well beyond Westminster. For the politician - and for Britain - this is uncharted territory...