Nick Clegg has spoken of his regret at not asking for more civil service support during his time as deputy prime minister.
Clegg, who served as deputy PM for five years during the coalition government, reveals in his soon-to-be-published memoirs that he began his time in office with "just a single civil servant" for help.
And he says he chose not to surround himself with a large team of officials in a bid to avoid an "infantile Whitehall turf war" between himself and the Conservative parts of the coalition.
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"While the 200 or so staff in Downing Street leapt into action to support the new prime minister, I was given just a single civil servant," Clegg writes.
"My mistake, at least at first, was to accept the model presented to me. Having negotiated the coalition agreement without the help of civil servants, and with no experience in government myself, I simply didn’t see the need to surround myself with teams of officials."
But the former Liberal Democrat leader – now acting as the party's Europe spokesperson – says the lack of official support resulted in a "tsunami of paperwork" to wade through, resulting in a diary that was "not only physically draining" but "politically debilitating".
"I was asked my opinion on things I didn’t have the remotest clue about – dense, technical issues to do with the mechanics of everything from local government finance to energy subsidies," he recalls.
"Every evening I would plonk myself on the sofa at home with my box and sit there dutifully wading through it, as family life happened around me. I would stay there virtually every night until the early hours. Then I would grab a few hours’ sleep, which were disturbed most nights by our then one-year-old son Miguel, only to get up early to help get our two older boys fed, changed and packed off to school."
Clegg says his decision not to beef up the team around him at the centre of government left him struggling to define the Lib Dems' role in coalition.
"Very quickly it became obvious that the central nervous system of Whitehall lay in the daily negotiations between me and Cameron," he writes. "At the same time, the two most senior Liberal Democrats in the cabinet, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne, were, notwithstanding their obvious intellectual strengths, not known as nature’s keenest team players.
"From the outset, their focus was devoted to their own departments – and their own political reputations. While they did this to great effect (and I encouraged them to do so), it meant I was unable to rely on others to defend in the media what we were doing. I soon became such a focal point for anger that I felt the impulse to defend myself publicly.
"No wonder Osborne said, somewhat smugly, in an interview in 2011 that, having expected to become British politics’ public enemy number one, he 'hadn’t reckoned on Nick Clegg'."