Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Gordon Brown, 58, is the leader of the Labour Party and became prime minister in June 2007 when Tony Blair stepped down after 10 years in power and three straight general election victories.Before taking the top job, Brown was Britain's longest-serving finance minister in 200 years. His first act as chancellor was to hand independence to the Bank of England, putting it in charge of setting interest rates.Born in Scotland in 1951, Brown is the second of three sons. His father was a minister in the Church of Scotland and strongly shaped his views. Brown has described his parents as "my inspiration, and the reason I am in politics"
Nick Clegg, 42, is the youngest of the three main party leaders and the most pro-European, bilingual in Dutch and English and married to a Spaniard, with whom he has three young sons. A former member of the European Parliament in Brussels, he took control of the party in 2007 after Menzies Campbell stood down over media criticism he was too old and out of touch. Despite being a polished and confident orator, Clegg had failed to lift the party above 20 per cent in opinion polls. However his performance in the televised debates has raised his status and support for the Lib Dems.
British opposition leader David Cameron, whose Conservatives are favourites to win the May 6 election, hopes to lead the centre-right party back to power after 13 years in opposition. Born in October 1966, Cameron was educated at Britain's most exclusive private school, Eton, and at Oxford University, where he joined the elitist Bullingdon dining club and gained a first-class degree in politics, philosophy and economics. After university, he went straight into a job at the Conservative Party. He was chosen as their leader in December 2005, months after suffering their third successive election defeat at the hands of the Labour Party. He is credited with making the Conservatives electable again after years in which it was regarded, in the words of a former chairman, as the "nasty party"
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