The piece provoked much mirth in political circles, with one writer noting: No wonder Cleggy looks so pasty and frayed. It is almost as if he lives in terror of Miriams fingertips clicking like castanets and summoning him to his housework.

She had stayed relatively quiet on the subject until last week, and will doubtless have been encouraged by the more positive reaction. Sites such as Mumsnet lit up with praise, The Guardian hailed her as the Michelle Obama of the Coalition, the woman with a sense of purpose bold enough to ignore the constraints of convention, while Telegraph commentator Dina Rickman declared: I had only one thought: could we replace Nick Clegg with her?

A nice idea, although it is doubtful that Miriam could take the pay cut. She earns a reported 500,000 a year four times as much as her husband with Dechert, an American-owned law firm that specialises in complex corporate and property cases. The salary discrepancy, matched by the perception of Miriams weighty intellect, has compounded the impression that she runs Casa Clegg, the familys home in Putney, south-west London, with a rod of iron.

The power dynamic, according to those who know the Cleggs, is rather more complicated. For all Miriams talk of equality, it is clear that her preferences tend to prevail. Only Spanish is spoken in the house, and despite the Deputy PMs declarations of agnosticism, the children are being raised in Miriams Roman Catholic faith. Shes number one in the kitchen, too, recently telling a Spanish magazine: Nick is forbidden from doing any cooking on health-and-safety grounds, but he does pretty much everything else. He compensates. He is an appalling cook.

Yet she supports, in a subtly effective fashion, his political career, embracing the Lib Dem agenda, illuminating its fringes, wearing sharp-but-non-threateningly-ethical outfits (being spotted emerging from the fabled royal corsetires, Rigby & Peller, was a rare slip), and dutifully insisting that she looks forward to the day the scent of her jamn y croquetas wafts into Downing Street.

The Cleggs met in the early Nineties in Bruges, where both were taking degrees at the College of Europe, a kind of Sandhurst for aspiring Eurocrats, and both were already passionate about the continents federal future. Soon they were equally passionate about each other. According to Miriam, her British suitor wooed her during Sevillian dancing sessions and over sizzling Spanish omelettes. Their romance, she once cryptically explained, was like taking a train that passes you in the night. This may have been because Clegg could barely understand a word she said. He nevertheless thought she was magnificent.

The magnificence first saw the light in May 1968, in Valladolid, a city somewhat tainted by its pro-Franco associations. Miriam grew up in the suburb of Olmedo, where her father, a teacher, was the conservative mayor. I am not a stranger to politics, she has said. I was delivering leaflets when I was eight years old. After university she went to Belgium, staying for several years to work for the EU. The Cleggs married in 2000.

The British remain faintly wary of exoticism, and Seora Clegg, with her raven tresses, and overtones of Carmen-like feistiness, has attracted some suspicion. During the last election, she gave a mangled explanation of why she wouldnt be on the campaign trail, implying it was because she couldnt afford to take the time off work. What she was trying to say was that she was different from other political wives because, well, she was different from all of us, and that rather than trying to make her husband look good on a stage, she preferred to knock him into shape beforehand.

Link:
Meet Miriam - the woman who keeps Nick Clegg on his toes