Nick Clegg: How Transcendental Meditation helped me with ‘the stresses of life’

As the election approaches, the odds on a hung Parliament are shortening, and Nick Clegg is emerging as something of a heavyweight, according to the Daily Telegraph (10 April 2010).

In an interview with Mick Brown, the LibDem leader spoke about his formative years and opened up about how Transcendental Meditation helped him during his years at Cambridge University and when he was starting out with his career.

He learnt Transcendental Meditation during his gap year after leaving Westminster School in London, as at the time he'd been 'tearing his hair out at home’, trying to write a novel.

"People may mock," he says, "but I found it an extremely good way to deal with the stresses of ordinary life."

He went on to practise Transcendental Meditation for the next five years, during which time he studied for a degree in anthropology at Robinson College, Cambridge and began his first political job in Brussels.

In an interview on ITV on 21 March, Clegg spoke about how, while travelling with brothers Marcel and Louis -  the TV presenter - Theroux in the USA, he would always halt the car for 20 minutes twice a day to practise Transcendental Meditation.

Clegg is not the first UK political party leader to practise the technique, as former Tory leader William Hague also learned Transcendental Meditation when he was young - 16 - in Sheffield. Shortly after, he famously emerged as a teenage whiz kid at a Conservative Party conference, and later went on to study at Oxford University. He continued to practise Transcendental Meditation long after this.

Conservative MP, Tim Yeo, is another politician who has spoken openly about how Transcendental Meditation has helped him.