The sexy Russian spy in Lib Dem leader hopeful Nick Clegg's past

Nick Clegg, the odds-on favourite

to become the next leader of the

Liberal Democrats, is one of the most

pro-European Westminster figures of

modern times.

The 40-year-old high-flyer is a former

aide to Brussels Commissioner Leon

Brittan, an ex-member of the EU Parliament

and last week pledged to back

the controversial constitutional treaty

which signs away our national sovereignty

in up to 60 areas.

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Now it can be revealed how Mr Clegg's

passion for all things continental is rooted

in his highly exotic family background.

Research by The Mail on Sunday has discovered

that ancestors on his father's side

include a Russian baroness who spied for

the Soviet Union and seduced the author

H.G. Wells.

Meanwhile, his Dutch mother

and her parents were interned during the

Second World War in a Tenko-style

Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in

colonial Java.

And Mr Clegg, who speaks five

languages fluently, is married to a

glamorous Spanish lawyer whose

father was a conservative senator in

the Madrid parliament.

Of all the many colourful names in

the Clegg family tree it is his greatgreat-

aunt Moura Budberg who

stands out above the rest.

The Russian-born noblewoman was

widely suspected of spying for both

the Soviet Union and British intelligence.

Sensuously beautiful – and

with a distinctly liberal attitude to

sex – her life was full of shadowy

entanglements and glamorous

liaisons.

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MI5 was warned by the

British Embassy in Moscow in the

early Twenties that she was 'a very

dangerous woman'.

She was mistress to science fiction

writer H.G. Wells and the Russian

literary giant Maxim Gorky, as well

as Robert Bruce Lockhart, probably

the most famous diplomat and spy

Britain ever sent to Moscow.

According to one account she

offered sexual favours to a

Lubyanka prison commandant after

the 1917 revolution to secure her

own release.

She then took food parcels and

books to her lover Lockhart, jailed in

a Kremlin dungeon under suspicion

of masterminding an attempt to

assassinate revolutionary leader

Lenin in 1918 and topple the Bolsheviks,

before brokering his release.

Later she came to know both Lenin

and Stalin, once giving an accordion

to the great dictator.

Budberg was born Maria

Ignatievna Zakrevskaya in St Petersburg

in 1891. She was one of four

children of eccentric tsarist senator

and landowner Ignatiy Platonovich

Zakrevsky.

He was a distinguished lawyer

and diplomat who served for a time

in London.

Budberg's sister, Alexandra, was

the mother of Clegg's grandmother,

Baroness Kira von Engelhardt, who

was born in Russia in 1909.

After the revolution, Budberg and

her niece Kira both eventually found

their way to Britain.

Many years later, having restyled

herself as a Left-wing socialite based

in Knightsbridge, Budberg gave

British intelligence a sensational

nugget of intelligence which, somehow,

they contrived to ignore.

In 1951, with Soviet agents Guy

Burgess and Donald Maclean both

having fled to Moscow, she fell

under suspicion.

Burgess had regularly visited her

apartment and while the secret services

had previously discounted

rumours that she was a Soviet agent,

now she was targeted by British

counter-intelligence.

MI5 files show that agent Jona

'Klop' Ustinov, father of the actor

Peter Ustinov, was sent to interrogate

her – and she was open in what

she revealed.

He reported: 'The most startling

thing Moura told me was that

Anthony Blunt, to whom Guy

Burgess was most devoted, is a

member of the Communist Party.'

The treachery of Blunt – the well

respected keeper of the Queen's

pictures – was

staring intelligence

chiefs in the face, yet it

was a further 12 years before

he confessed to spying for the USSR.

Kira left Russia in 1917, spending

her school years in Estonia, and after

a short time in

Berlin, travelled

to England in 1929,

eventually settling and marrying

an Englishman.

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The story surrounding the maternal

side of the Clegg family is almost

as exotic. Mr Clegg's Dutch mother,

Hermance van den Wall Bake,

endured terrible privations as a child

– not unlike those portrayed in

Tenko, the Eighties television series

about European women and children

incarcerated by the Japanese after

the fall of Singapore.

Born in 1936 in Indonesia – then

under Dutch colonial rule – her

entire family was taken prisoner

when the Japanese imperial army

invaded in 1942.

Hermance, her two sisters and

their mother Louise were sent to one

of the worst concentration camps in

the capital, Jakarta, while father

Hemmy was separated from his wife

and children and interned in another

part of the jail.

The family were freed in 1945 and

reunited after three years of

appalling hardship.

After the war they returned to Holland

to rebuild their lives, Hemmy

becoming a successful businessman

and eventually president of Dutch

banking giant ABN. The family,

pillars of the Dutch Establishment,

were on friendly terms with the

country's royal family.

In 1956 Hermance visited Cambridge

where she met Mr Clegg's

father, also called Nick. They married

three years later and have

four children and eight grandchildren.

Hemmy died in 1991 and

Louise in 2000.

They are survived by a large and

closely knit family who still meet

every five years for a reunion in

Amersfoort, the town near Amsterdam

where several members of the

van den Wall Bake clan still live.

One of Mr Clegg's Dutch cousins,

Frank van den Wall Bake, 63, said:

'The war was a terrible time for the

family. The children were with their

mother but they could only see

their father on the other side of the

barbed wire.

'They all survived but Hemmy

retained a profound hatred for the

Japanese for the rest of his life.'

Mr Clegg, who was educated at

Cambridge and the elite public

school Westminster, met his Spanish

wife Miriam, a successful international

lawyer, while they were both

working in Brussels.

Her politician father, Jose Antonio

Gonzalez Caviedes, died in a

car crash four years before she

married.

The senator was 58 when he suffered

a heart attack at the wheel of

his car in 1996. He lost control of the

vehicle and crashed head-on into an

oncoming lorry.

Nick Clegg's mother-in-law,

Mercedes, still teaches chemistry

and physics at the secondary school

in the family's home town of Olmedo

in central Spain.