They don’t make ’em like Paddy any more
Tough special forces soldier. MI6 officer. Formidable diplomat. And a giant of British politics...
TO THOSE unaware of how ill he was, Paddy Ashdown’s death at the age of 77 will have come as a shock – because he always fizzed with the energy of a man decades younger. The fast-talking, quickwitted former diplomat, Royal Marine and SBS captain brought a new vibrancy and muscularity to his party, waking up colleagues with 7am mobile phone calls before pounding away on a rowing machine in the House of Commons gym, and drawing on his military experience to take instant naps and eat on the move.
When he took over the leadership of the newly merged Social and Liberal Democrats in July 1988, the party was on the brink of extinction, languishing at five per cent in the polls, neck and neck with the Greens and earning the soubriquet the ‘dead parrot’ party from Margaret Thatcher.
Within two years, Ashdown had pulled the party up to 18 per cent of the vote in local elections and captured Eastbourne from the Tories in October 1990. By the mid-1990s, as Tony Blair was performing similar feats with Labour, Ashdown had succeeded in turning the party into a new political force.
The two resurgent forces nearly combined. During the run-up to the 1997 General Election, Ashdown and Blair held secret ‘coalition’ talks: they had a candid relationship, with Ashdown once telling him that ‘some folk think you are a smarmy git’.
But after Blair won his 179-seat landslide, he decided that Ashdown’s lack of experience in running a big department invalidated his claim to a Cabinet post.
Many senior Labour figures, including Chancellor Gordon Brown, objected to Ashdown’s enthusiasm for joining the euro, a judgment validated by subsequent events.
Ashdown, who had taken the Liberals over the space of 12 years from near-extinction to a party with 46 MPs, privately admitted to bitterness over the missed opportunity.
Instead, after standing down as leader in 1999 and taking a peerage he evolved into grandee figurehead for the party, commanding a level of respect his successors could never match.
The action-man image was not to everyone’s taste, perhaps unsurprisingly in a party renowned for sclerotic decision-making and politically correct, bleeding-heart policy-making. Some colleagues would wince when he ‘joked’ that he could ‘kill you all with my bare hands’.
His most challenging period came in 1992 when it was revealed that he had had a five-month affair with his former secretary, Patricia Howard. The ‘Paddy Pantsdown’ monicker led to a torrent of mocking headlines, but his wife of 30 years, Jane, whom he had met when he was 20 and she was 21, forgave him.
The episode was particularly painful because he had used happy family snaps on his personal election material. In a subsequent interview, claiming that it had drawn him closer to his wife, he said: ‘Most people think I am a rampant carnivore, but there is an oddly feminine quality to my character.’
In later years he described Jane as ‘the bedrock of my existence’, saying: ‘Just as my mother had been the calm centre of the family who doled out huge amounts of unconditional love, while my father was more opinionated and adventurous, she played the same role. Sometimes she has said she could have done with fewer adventures during our marriage.’
The electorate also forgave him: his personal poll ratings increased, and his constituency party rallied to his support.
Born Jeremy John Durham Ashdown in Delhi to an Irish family, he later adopted his schoolboy nickname of Paddy. His father had been an officer in the Indian Army and Ashdown said that one of his earliest memories was seeing dead bodies in the streets, the result of conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
He spent his childhood years on a farm his father had purchased in County Down, Northern Ireland, before attending Bedford School, in England, where he was described as a swashbuckling, rangy and handsome figure. He admitted to a sexual relationship with a female maths teacher, which he described in his memoir, A Fortunate Life, as ‘a rite of passage’.
He did not take naturally to academic life, with one report describing him as vain and a poor team-player. He left before taking his A-levels and joined the Royal
Marines in 1959. It was the making of him: he saw active service in Borneo and the Persian Gulf, became the youngest commander in the SBS, the aquatic equivalent of the SAS, and after learning Malay he studied Chinese for twoand-a-half years before becoming an MI6 officer with diplomatic cover in Geneva.
Despite an apparently idyllic time – with a comfortable salary, a clear career path and skiing at the weekends, he soon became characteristically restless.
He decided to quit, return to the UK and launch a political career, declaring himself horrified at the state of the UK following the period of industrial unrest and fuel shortages in the mid-1970s.
‘Most of my friends thought I was utterly bonkers,’ he said later.
The former Labour supporter no longer felt at home in the party. ‘I discovered that I had never really been a socialist,’ he said.
He decided to fight Yeovil, his wife’s home town, despite it being a seemingly impregnable Tory stronghold, and worked for years to ‘nurse’ it while juggling periods of unemployment and short-term jobs including working for a sheepskin coat-makers, Westland Helicopters and as a youth worker for Dorset County Council.
It was a brutally tough period for him and his young family.
‘Nothing I have ever done was as hard as that,’ he said once. ‘It unmanned me.’
He failed in the 1979 Election, but won in 1983 with just over 50 per cent of the popular vote.
It was the era of the SDP-Liberal Alliance and Ashdown quickly found himself appointed as the Liberal spokesman on trade and industry. But he didn’t take instinctively to the Commons, struggling in the chamber.
So he strove to fashion the energetic everyman image instead, becoming a prominent campaigner against the stationing of American cruise missiles on British soil and speaking out against Mrs Thatcher’s decision to allow the US to use bases in Britain to bomb Libya.
His brash bravado – and insistence that Labour was doomed and the Liberal Democrats would replace them – carried him through his difficult early years as leader as he tried to reshape a party described as ‘confused, demoralised, starved for money and in the grip of a bitter identity crisis’.
His position after the Tiananmen Square massacre – that Hong Kong citizens should be allowed to come to Britain – made many Liberals feel the party had recovered its soul, while the Gulf War gave him a chance to showcase his military experience as he set up his own ‘War Cabinet’ and sped between TV and radio studios.
After he resigned the leadership in 1999, Ashdown was elevated to the peerage as Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon.
He spent much of his ‘grandee’ period concentrating on his interest in Bosnia. In March 2002, he testified as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal.
After he took up the post of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina in May 2002, he was sometimes described mockingly as ‘the Viceroy of Bosnia’ by critics, because of his allegedly high-handed approach to the post. Ashdown left that job in May
It’s not my job to be popular. I’m goal-driven, my job is to get results... I’ve fought a lot of battles in my life
2006. But he steered his party through the many political squalls it endured, including the resignation of his successor Charles Kennedy following widespread reports of his heavy drinking.
In 2007 it was reported that Gordon Brown, then the Labour Prime Minister, had offered Ashdown the job of Northern Ireland Secretary. However, Sir Menzies Campbell, then leader of the Liberal Democrats, did not want members of his party to hold office in a Labour Government.
It was widely thought Ashdown would be offered a Cabinet post in the ConservativeLiberal Democrat Coalition Government formed in 2010, but again he was to be disappointed.
He chaired the party’s election campaign in 2015, notoriously taking issue with the exit poll which suggested the Lib Dems would end the night with ten seats.
Appearing on the BBC election results programme, Ashdown promised to ‘eat his hat’ if the poll proved right. In the event, the party won only eight.
Ashdown spent his final months playing a key behind-the-scenes role in attempting to reshape the political landscape again by holding talks with anti-Corbyn Labour MPs about setting up a new centre ground party with the help of Left-leaning Tory MPs.
He campaigned against Brexit, and many of his cross-party discussions centred on the possibility of establishing a new pro-Remain force.
To colleagues who objected that his action-man image was contrary to the delicate sensibilities of the party, he would say: ‘It’s not my job to be popular. I’m goal-driven, my job is to get results.’
In recent years he became increasingly reflective about the personal and political forces which formed him, including the tragedies of his younger brother Richard dying when he was only 11 months old in India, his brother Robert succumbing to leukaemia when he was 14 and a sister dying in a car crash. He said: ‘Losing three children was very hard on my parents, who turned to spiritualism for comfort.
‘Those losses affected me too, of course. I have always felt great anxiety when any of the children or grandchildren have been ill.’
Asked whether he was a good father he said: ‘I made space for my children to have their own lives, but my political ambitions swallowed a lot of the time I could have spent being with them.
‘Jane gets much more of the credit for bringing up two wonderful children. I adore being a grandfather.’
Ashdown had a typically no-nonsense approach to the diagnosis of bladder cancer.
‘I’ve fought a lot of battles in my life,’ he would tell sympathisers.
But it would be one battle even the action man of Westminster couldn’t win.