Miriam González Durantez (Mrs Clegg) talks to the CNJ as she helps an old friend

Published: 22 April 2010
by DAN CARRIER

SHE famously said she would not face the press, nor play a big role in the General Election campaign.

But Miriam González Durantez – aka Mrs Nick Clegg – broke her rule for the New Journal on Sunday.

Lending a hand to old friend Ed Fordham, Ms González Durantez agreed to speak to us in the West Hampstead garden of Lib Dem councillor Flick Rea.

She said she was keeping her feet on the ground amid the Cleggmania which has grown since Thursday’s first leaders’ debate.

“Of course the hype is the over the top,” she said. “But it is natural there is some hype. It is enormously exciting that people may be thinking of doing something different, but it was just one debate. There is a still a lot of work to be done. It is a completely open election and it is a privilege to see  it from nearby.”

Ms González Durantez said she was mucking in because the couple’s three children were stranded in Spain by the volcanic ash delays after visiting their grandfather.

A lawyer at the international firm DLA Piper, she said she was not going to take a lead role in the campaign: “All I have said is I will help and be supportive. I believe very strongly in what they say. I will help without it hijacking my life. My life is that of a working mum, and so I have decided to focus on taking care of the children at the moment.”

But she said of Mr Fordham: “He has been a very loyal friend and has been with us through good and bad moments. I think Ed Fordham is a fantastic member of the party.”

Her father, José Antonio González Caviedes, was a politician for the centre-right Spanish People’s Party, a coalition established in the dying days of Franco’s Fascist regime.

She said her father had been a bigger influence on her politics than Mr Clegg.

“My father curiously enough ended up in the Liberal Union which integrated with the People’s Party. I supported my father at the time and I had always thought of myself as in the centre of politics,” she said. “Me and my husband never agree on things 100 per cent but I am a member of the Lib-Dems not because Nick Clegg is the leader but because I believe in the policies.”