We met in Brussels when we were working as civil servants for Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan. Sir Leon surrounded himself with bright young people, among whom Nick Clegg stood out. We were impressed by Nick's enormous capacity for work, the speed and perfection with which he executed all tasks, his perfect command of several languages (English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish), his oral and written communication skills. Everything indicated that he had a great political degree program ahead of him. Shortly after leaving Brussels, he became the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party and achieved a historic result in 2010 by beating Labour in the general election and was appointed Deputy Prime Minister, paired with the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.

A convinced Europeanist, his life path has led him to it: son of a Dutch mother and a half-Russian father, he studied at the high school European Bruges, worked for many years in Brussels as an official of the European Commission and as a member of Parliament, and is married to the Spanish lawyer and civil servant, Miriam González Durántez.

But he has an increasingly difficult time in a United Kingdom full of Eurosceptics, who demand an immediate exit from the European Union, where everything that comes from Brussels is bad by definition. The Liberal Democrats are the only ones who are not yet ashamed to define themselves as pro-European. Clegg is a realist and considers a referendum inevitable.

At speech recently, he stated that "Britain is playing with fire. Leaving the EU would be economic suicide, would compromise security and would relegate the country to an irrelevant role. Brussels is by no means perfect, but it is not true that some kind of sinister super-bureaucracy reigns there; its issue of civil servants, for example, is smaller than those of Birmingham City Council." Clegg has turned to the silent pro-Europeans to raise their voices: "I call on you to stand up so that Britain remains part of Europe. The next few years will be decisive. Merkel has just declared that "if Britain were to leave the European Union, it would be making a huge historic mistake".