Nick Clegg: the new, the next Churchill?

With just 10 days to go until Britain votes in its general election, Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, is the new star in the eyes of voters. According to a poll by YouGov, Clegg is the most popular British politician since Winston Churchill. Since his impressive performance in two television debates against Gordon Brown and David Cameron, the Liberal Democrats have moved from having the status of outsiders to challenging the country's two leading parties — the Conservatives and Labour — on 6 May.

Nick Clegg was born in Buckinghamshire in 1967, and he brings a colourful family history to British politics. His great-great-grandfather, the nobleman Ignaty Zakrevsky, was attorney general of the Russian senate, while his great-great-aunt, Baroness Moura Budberg, was the mistress of H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorky and Robert Bruce Lockhart, a famous British spy working in Moscow. Clegg's mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, was born in Indonesia and was sent to a concentration camp by the Japanese after they captured Batavia (Jakarta) in 1942. Clegg speaks English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish.

A strong result on 6 May by his party could result in a "hung parliament", giving the Lib Dems, as they are called, near-unprecedented power.