It’s party conference season in the UK , and once again Miriam Gonzalez, the wife of the deputy-prime minister, Nick Clegg, has provided a better photopportunity than any other figure in her husband’s lack-lustre Liberal Democrat party could imagine in his or her dreams.
Ms Gonzalez looks and acts as a woman where duty and ambition co-exist in perfect harmony, being-as she is- perfectly in tune with her commitments as mother, lawyer, and wife of a leading politician, with that extra touch of style and natural human warmth, that her Spanish blood gives her.
Working as she does for an international law firm, she is emblemic of a generation of Spanish women who have taken advantages of the equal opportunities that have surpassed previous political and cultural barriers. She seems at home, and as self-confident in Glasgow (where the Lib Dem party conference was this week) as in her native Valladolid.
At the same time this EU citizen remains a committed Roman Catholic. Thankfully, long gone are the days when such religious principles might have proved a disadvantage in the UK, with Spanish wives of UK citizens looked at with suspicion by members of the establishment, even if they too were Catholic .
In his published diary, Evelyn Waugh referred to my Spanish mother Mabel-newly arrived in postwar London as the young bride of his friend, the publisher Tom Burns- as of “swarthy, squat, Japanese appearance.” While my father retained a certain literary respect for Waugh, my mother came to think of him, not without some justification, as a misogynist, and of a social and cultural snobbery that verged on racism. These are not labels, thankfully, one can attach to Ms Gonzalez’s husband or his friends. Mr Clegg’s agnosticism has long co-existed perfectly happily alongside his wife’s Faith. I can think of few political couples of such seemingly perfect fit and, as an Anglo-Spaniard, I know how culturally enriched their children must feel.
