Profile: He's the cactus-burning lover of 30 women – but just who is Nick Clegg?

BEFORE his tour de force on Britain's first televised leaders' debate, Nick Clegg was perhaps best known for the number of notches on his bedpost.

The Lib Dem leader's nickname of "Cleggover" – usually accompanied by a puerile snigger – came after he said he had slept with "no more than 30" women when he was interviewed by Piers Morgan.

Politicians are not known for volunteering such information about their private lives and until this week that ill-judged admission was almost the extent of his public profile.

That brief glimpse into his pre-marital sexual exploits even overshadowed a drunken escapade when he was a teenager at Westminster School, London.

In 2007 Mr Clegg confessed at a Lib Dem fringe meeting that he had "torched two greenhouses of cacti" belonging to a professor in a drunken prank during a school exchange trip to Munich. Only afterwards, he recalled, did he discover to his shame that he had destroyed part of the "private collection of Germany's foremost cacti collector".

The young Mr Clegg accepted a community service sentence digging gardens.

But his rise to prominence has made the public aware that there is more to him than schoolboy pranks and his conquests before his marriage to Miriam, a successful lawyer and mother of his three children Antonio, Alberto and Miguel.

The Lib Dem leader grew up in Oxfordshire with two brothers and a sister in a large extended family. His mother is Dutch and his father is half Russian, a background to which he attributes his interest in European languages. He speaks Dutch, French, Spanish and German.

After Westminster School, Mr Clegg studied social anthropology at Cambridge.

He continued his postgraduate studies at the University of Minnesota and the College of Europe in Bruges. As a trainee journalist, he worked in New York with Christopher Hitchens.

He also worked as a consultant in London, and in Budapest writing about economic reform, having won a prize from the Financial Times.

He moved to Brussels where he worked for five years for the European Commission. He has acted as a trade negotiator with China and Russia, then as a senior member of Leon Brittan's office, who was vice-president of the EC at the time.

In 1999 he was elected Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands – the first Liberal parliamentarian in the whole region since the 1930s.

In 2004 he stood down as an MEP because he was finding it difficult to balance his career with his family life and he lectured part-time at Sheffield and Cambridge universities. He became the MP for Sheffield Hallam in 2005.

After Ming Campbell's tenure at the top of the party came to an end, Mr Clegg was elected Liberal Democrat leader in 2007 by defeating Chris Huhne in a leadership election.

He is a lover of the outdoors and claims to be an "expert" skier.