Learn English – meant by “Nothing up your sleeves”

To be nothing like means it is completely different and has nothing in common. Nothing like anything means incomparable; completely different from all other things. This is the literal meaning of the term, no figurative or idiom involved.

There are three examples of nothing like anything in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):

it was just an unbelievable event and nothing like anything the country had ever gone through before

Here the speaker means the event was completely unlike any event previously experienced in the country.

" It seems like I've always had some type of adversity, " Bobby says. " My freshman year at Duke, we lost the title game by 30 to UNLV.... But this is big adversity, nothing like anything else. # "

Here the speaker is referring to some type of adversity that this time has a magnitude never before seen, incomparable to any previous adversity.

" She spun around, drinking in the scenery, marveling at its almost palpable presence. " But... this is nothing like anything I've ever seen on the' net! "

Here, whatever it is the speaker is experiencing is unlike any experience she has had in the same environment.

The figurative usage was probably around much earlier, but here's a reference just after WW1 to the British bulldog spirit carrying us through to victory, though it really caught on during/after WW2 when we survived The Blitz. And, of course, John Bull has been a personification of England/Britain since C18.

Bulldogs are (feasibly incorrectly) assumed to be named for their role in bull baiting. It doesn't matter what the historical truth might be - Brits like (certainly used to like) the imagery. The key characteristics being alluded to are persistence, fortitude, courage, etc.

Clegg probably used the term loosely to imply Britain wasn't living up to its cultural heritage, with maybe something of a crude appeal to patriotism. Just a politician's sound bite, IMHO.

I can't really cite the fact that Brits sometimes call the French "frogs" as part of the same pattern, but before WW2 Brits often used the Russian bear to refer to the country. I'm sure there are other animal/country conflations, but I can't think of one for Germany - as of WW2 we called them the German steamroller.

There's this use of Enter the dragon 'to save the euro’ referencing China, but it really depends on the pre-existing phrase allowing "dragon" to stand in for "China" in this one-off usage.