Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has been named the UK's new Deputy Prime Minister after his party formed a coalition with David Cameron's Conservatives.
Clegg will be the first Liberal for nearly 90 years to hold power in Britain, and has pledged to form "a new kind of government" with the Tories.
Clegg re-energised the UK election campaign with powerful perfomances in the first two election debates which briefly thrust his party into second place in the polls.
The Lib Dems' eventual performance in the election was disappointing: they notched up 57 seats - five fewer than in 2005.
But this was enough to give them - and Clegg - the role of 'kingmaker' - deciding which of the other parties, Labour or the Conservatives, to back.
Fervent EU supporter Clegg, 43, was elected as leader of the Lib Dems in 2007, after just two years in parliament as the MP for Sheffield Hallam, in northern England.
He made a name for himself early on with his strong defence of civil liberties and by breaking parliamentary taboo by openly criticising the war in Afghanistan.
His fervent support of the European Union and the euro and his international background has singled him out among British politicians, but his privileged past has also drawn comparisons with the Eton-educated Cameron.
Born on January 7, 1967, and brought up in the affluent village of Chalfont St. Giles in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, Clegg grew up with two brothers and a sister.
His family history is exotic - his mother is Dutch, having been born in Indonesia and held in a Japanese internment camp before she came to Britain aged 12, while his wealthy banker father is descended from Russian nobility.
Exotic family history
His wife Miriam is a Spanish commercial lawyer who famously refused to join her husband on the campaign trail, insisting she had a day job to do instead.
The couple married in 2000 and their sons - Antonio, Alberto and Miguel - are all bilingual. Clegg himself speaks Dutch, French, German and Spanish.
Clegg attended London's elite Westminster school alongside a young Helena Bonham Carter, the future Hollywood star.
He got into trouble as a 16-year-old there when he got drunk and set fire to a collection of rare cacti on a school trip to Munich.
He went on to study social anthropology at Cambridge University, where he starred in a play directed by future Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, who remains a friend.
Lecturer, lobbyist
He completed his education at the University of Minnesota and the College of Europe in Bruges, where he met his future wife, the "love of his life".
Before that, Clegg enjoyed the single life - he told GQ magazine in a now notorious 2008 interview that he had slept with "no more than 30" women, earning him the nickname "Nick Clegg-over".
He worked briefly as a journalist and a political consultant before joining the European Commission where he worked for five years, including as senior aide to Commission vice president Leon Brittan, a Conservative.
He subsequently stood as a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament in 1999, a job he held until 2004.
At that point, finding the travelling too much for his young family, Clegg stood down and returned to England where he worked as a lecturer and a part-time lobbyist before joining parliament in 2005.
