The last time I interviewed Miriam González Durántez, the international trade lawyer and women’s rights advocate who happens to be married to Sir Nick Clegg, it was 2015, and we were in the factory of a motorcycle parts manufacturer somewhere in Dumbartonshire. She was on the campaign trail for her husband, who was about to lead the Liberal Democrats into a political black hole after a failed period in coalition government with the Tories, where he served as deputy prime minister and went back on the party’s key manifesto promise on tuition fees.

Anyway, I got the impression that Miriam was there through gritted teeth – not because she had a problem with Dumbartonshire, or the motorcycle parts factory we found ourselves in (it being run entirely by women, she was quite taken with it, actually) – but because she resented having to perform the role of political “flowerpot”, as she describes it now. She was – is – an immensely accomplished professional in her own right, a trade negotiator who had travelled pregnant to Iran, Pakistan and Syria as part of her role advising Chris Patten at the European Commission. She sat on the boards of huge banks and multinational companies. She was considered an expert in her field. And suddenly, she was reduced to having to tell journalists like me where she had bought the dress she was wearing (Topshop, as it turned out that particular day).

A lot has changed since then. There’s been a pandemic, obviously, but even before that, things had shifted a fair bit for Miriam and her family: her husband lost his seat, the UK left the EU, and in turn the González-Cleggs decided to leave the UK for California, where her husband took on a role at the company formerly known as Facebook, a role which arguably gives him far more power (not to mention money) than he had when deputy PM.

But there was also a terrible cancer diagnosis for their oldest son, Antonio, who was just 14 when he found a lump at the top of his chest in 2016. It turned out that Antonio had stage 2 Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer that was present all over his chest and neck. After gruelling bouts of chemotherapy, he is now in remission and thriving at university in America, but his mother touches the wood of the desk she sits at when I ask about it today.

“It messes with your mind,” she explains over Zoom. “I used to think I would look at my children and I would know whether they were healthy or not. And now I don’t have any trust in the body, because Antonio was doing lots of sports while he had cancer. He felt totally well. He was not tired or having night sweats, but he still had it. It plays tricks with your mind, cancer.”

González grew up in a small village in north-west Spain, the daughter of two teachers, and she says she still feels like a “very Mediterranean mum”. As well as Antonio, she has two other sons – all the boys are aged between 12 and 19. “What does it teach you?” she says, when I ask her about Antonio’s cancer diagnosis. “Well, when you are going through it, you don’t feel you are learning anything. You are being told ‘this is cancer’. When something really bad happens, a new channel opens up in your mind and you go into this movie-like, slower time, where you find yourself removed from the world. You are not thinking about learning. You’re just thinking about going hour by hour and minute by minute and trying to survive it. I mean, luckily he is well now, but at the beginning you just don’t know how he is going to cope with it.”

She is a thoughtful interviewee, as considered as you would expect an international trade lawyer to be. But I can see that some of her composure goes when I ask about that terrible time.

“If I look back, I think what I learnt the most is that perhaps I’m the kind of parent who likes to sort things out. So whenever my children have problems, I step in and I sort it. If they’re not doing well at school, I push them and I work with them, and if they have an issue with a friendship I try to advise them. My way to help is through action, and that was the very first time there was nothing I could do.”

She pauses, takes a deep breath. “Nothing at all. I just have to sit there and just take it. I just have to be there for him. There’s nothing else I can do. And, in a way, it’s good that you learn there are things in life where there is nothing you can do. This is acceptance. But I have to say, and it happened after the death of my father [25 years ago] as well, that you kind of think, ‘Now I know!’”

And here she affects an overly dramatic accent. “I know what matters in life! I am not going to get upset about the traffic, I am not going to think that so-and-so is an idiot and is making my life impossible! And yet you just fall back into all that again. It’s probably our way of dealing with life: we focus on the little routines and the irrelevant things, rather than on the bigger picture.”

It helps that the González-Cleggs are what she calls “a very close family. As has happened with many other families, Covid has brought us even closer. And probably coming here,” she says, motioning to the oak-panelled room around her, California sunshine streaming through the windows. “It was a bit of an adventure.”