There are few politicians with a responsibility for law and order who have a conviction for arson. Fewer arsonists still run for the leadership of their party. But Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, is the baby-faced exception that proves the rule.
As a 16-year-old exchange student in Germany, he secured a minor criminal conviction for arson after he and a friend “torched two greenhouses of cacti belonging to a professor”. The local newspaper put the story on its front page and young Clegg was given community service. The angry professor asked him, “How would you like it if I killed your cat?”, and Clegg spent a summer looking for replacements for the private collection of Germany’s foremost cactus collector.
