Paddy Ashdown: DAVID STEEL pays tribute to his friend

PADDY Ashdown, throughout his career, had been seen as an “action man”, which was why the thought of his being ill seemed so unlikely and his premature death so cruel. He had told colleagues just a month ago that he would be off for a little time while he was treated for cancer. It was not to be – it had spread more than he realised.

Jeremy John Durham Ashdown had been born in India and brought up in Northern Ireland (which is how he acquired the nickname of Paddy) and those two factors left him with an abiding hostility to any sectarianism or racism.

He came relatively late to politics, having had an admired career in the Special Boat Section of the Marines and seen service in Borneo, Malaya and Northern Ireland.

Then he had a somewhat shadowy Foreign Office posting in Geneva which was not much to his liking and he returned to Britain, took on the Liberal candidature in Yeovil (a Conservative seat) and struggled for a while without a job and was hard up.

“I was naive to the point of irresponsibility,” he later admitted. He won the seat at the second attempt in 1983 and held it until his retirement from the Commons in 2001.

He was a dedicated and greatly loved being a constituency MP.

I appointed him spokesman on Trade and Industry and we got used to his informal habit of removing his jacket and draping it on a chair at any meeting.

He was ahead of the game on technology and I well remember him lecturing us more than 30 years ago on how, in the age of computers, people would eventually use them to do their shopping – I admit I told him I did not believe a word of it, but of course he was proved right.

Following the rather prolonged and messy union between the SDP and the Liberal Party, he was elected leader of the new united party of which he had a difficult start.

An early opinion poll registered hardly any support – I had stood down and people had not yet heard of Ashdown, so there was a widespread and incorrect view that the new party was a failure.

He was dogged with arguments over its name – he himself advocated “the Democrats”, later admitting that was a mistake and “Liberal Democrats” was the title eventually chosen.

In his first two years he also had to compete with David Owen’s “continuing SDP”.

His approach to the leadership was much more hands on – he took the chairmanship of the policy committee for example and he quickly earned support for his energy, enthusiasm and campaigning strategy.

He and I shared a standing joke that I never attended any of his speeches.

This was true because I told him that having seen the trouble ex-leaders Heath and then Thatcher caused the Tory Party, I saw no point in turning up at party conferences.

We nevertheless spoke regularly, and I was encouraging of what he called “the project” – his fruitful talks with prime minister Tony Blair about trying to heal the rift, begun in the 1930s, between the Liberal and Labour parties.

The Labour Party had begun as the “Labour representation committee” within the Liberal Party but found the party insufficiently welcoming to more trade union representation in the Commons.

Just after the 1992 election, he argued that, “We should work with others to assemble the ideas around which a non-socialist alternative to the Conservatives could be constructed”.

That all came to a sudden end when Blair won a landslide victory in 1997 and had no need to woo the Liberals. Over two general elections, Paddy had so impressed the electorate that he saw the Liberal Democrats rise to more than 40 seats in the Commons – far removed from the dozen or so under Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe and myself.

With the largest representation since 1929, they were now a serious third force in Parliament, as had been envisaged with the merger of the two parties.

On leaving the Commons he was elevated to the peerage and asked to undertake the job of High Representative in Bosnia, being responsible for turning that war-torn territory into a democratic state.

That, I suppose, was his most important achievement, but we should not forget his espousal of the rights of citizens in Hong Kong at the time of the handover to post-Tiananmen Square China to hold full British passports – a classic demonstration of Liberal values.

After the inconclusive election of 2010 he became a late but committed supporter of the Lib-Con coalition while Charles Kennedy and I remained sceptical – his predecessor and successor alike.

He accepted the about-turn on student fees, the AV referendum and other blunders, and headed the consequent 2015 election campaign, famously challenging the exit poll on the night and offering to “eat my hat” if it were correct.

Sadly it was, and that was the only period in which we two found ourselves in disagreement.

The Liberal Democrats have inevitably taken a long time to recover.

Yet he remained his cheerful self, always ready to give advice in the weekly group meetings in the House of Lords.

But he never much liked either the Commons or the Lords and gloried in his family and his holiday house in France.

His wife Jane and their son and daughter were an exceptionally close unit which is how he survived the publicity of a fling with one of his secretaries.

I recall a memorable night with him in France where we sampled every one of the wine cellars in the local village.

He also took to writing, apart from his own biographical diaries, starting with a clear account of the Cockleshell Heroes and continuing with a well-researched account of the French resistance and then a novel based on much the same ground.

In the last conversation with him I said how much I had enjoyed that last book, and he told me he was working on another.

That aspect of his life received little attention in the obituaries, but his books will remain a permanent reminder of this charismatic individual.