It is purely accidental that I once again found myself reading another Sunday Times top 10 best seller this year, but I have owned this book for a while now, and am familiar with Paddy Ashdown's excellent factual recounting of the 'cockleshell' raid of WW2 recounted in 'A Brilliant Little Operation', so took the chance of a long flight to Johannesburg to start this book, written in 2009.
In nearly 400 pages of close typed text, Paddy Ashdown chronicles what has indeed been an extraordinary life, particularly when compared to the manufactured politicians, most of whom have no real world experience, that we find in Britain today. The book starts, after a short prologue of Ashdown's 1st meeting o Radovan Karadic, with a potted history of the 2 sides of the Ashdown and the accidents of history that brought his mother and father together in the British India of the late 1930s. During WW2, Ashdown's father would reach the rank of Colonel fighting the Japanese and it was in one of the infrequent leave periods he obtained that Jeremy John Durham (he would get the nickname Paddy at school and it would follow him in the Royal Marines, simply because the school attended happended to provide a number of RM officer recruits) Ashdown was conceived.
Ashdown's early years were spent 1srt in India , until the end of the Raj when the family moved to the parent's ancestral pprovince of Northern Ireland. Still young, Ashdown would go along on his fathers' poaching and fishing trips. Sent away to school Ashdown was no great scholar, oddly given his later renowned linguistic skills, he was particualrly criticised for his lack of ability in languages. Unsurprisingly his key strengths were in athletic pursuts but another weakness was Maths, which he needed for selection as an RM officer. Solving this issue though had a happier outcome as his 30 yr old female private maths tutor offered the young lad more than maths tuition!
From school, Ashdown was accepted, at the 2nd attempt, for RM officer training at which he seems to have thrived. This period is easily the most interesting of the book as he covers his basic training and inital posting to Singapore, during the Indonesian confrintation. Accounts of operations are interspersed with his marriage and the learning of Malay and then onto his training in the SBS and return to Singapore. SBS operations are covered as well as the development of remarkable skills to deploy divers directly from submarines and recover them (essentially by having them fish for the sub). Also covered is his tour of his native Northern Ireland at the start of the troubles.
Ashdown, at the end of his SBS tour took a leave of abscence to learn Mandarin Chinese for a couple of years being based in Hong Kong. Before his family flew out he lived for several months with a Chinese family to help develop his knowledge of the language. As a serving British soldier, it was thought that with Mao's cultural revolution waging to the north, that Ashdown was vulnerable and a couple of incidents stick out for their level of threat but also as hilarious vignettes. For example when out with Chinese friends their group was confronted by a horde of students shouting Maoist slogans and waving copies of Mao's red book. This did not look good but Ashdown's companions told him to put his head down whilst they also started waving red books in the air, the students passed cheerily. Ironically the red books waved by Ashdowns friends were their cheque books - the ultimate capitalist symbols but exactly the same shade of red as Mao's tome.
As a now fluent Mandarin speaker, Ashdown's days in the army were numbered, as soon as the NI tour was over he was scouted by 'the Foreign Office' to act as a spy based out of UN offices in Geneva. It was whilst on leave from this job the he became interested in Liberal politics and when his tour was over he resigned (without having a job to go to) and settled in Yeovil, where he and his wife had earlier bought a home. Why Liberalism? Ashdown answers the question easily by pointing out the essential difference between Liberalism and Socialism being the Liberalism is about the equality of opportunity whereas Socialism aims for the equality of outcome (thereby lowering everybody's outcome!).
The 2nd half of the book moves on to Ashdown's political career and finally his work in Bosnia, initially as leader of the Lib Dems - essentially as an interfering British MP in the civil wars of 1992 -95 and then later as the appointed UN representative for reconstrucing the country in the 2000s (which saw his initial appointment doubled in length from 2 to 4 years)
Relying on his savings initially, Ashdown was selected as the candidate for the Liberals in Yeovil (then a safe Tory seat) in 1977. His strategy, he claims was to take the constituency party from 3rd place to second and then to overturn the Tory majority within 3 elections. One key tactic that he used was to act as if he was already the constituency MP; by holding constituency surgeries he was able to solve peoplpe's problems, usually with the then Ccnservative controlled council, just as an MP could be expected to do so. He was elected as MP at the 2nd election. The politics of this period have now moved into history but the 1983 General Election was fought with the backgroiund of the Labour meltdown under Michael Foot and the defection of Owen; Jenkins; Williams; Rodgers at el to form the SDP. Ashdown covers the increasing close relationship between the Liberals and the SDP that lead eventually to the formal merging of the parties (when David Steel astounded all by outwitting David Owen). It was at this point that Ashdown became leader and it was his task to merge the 2 parties, a task that was to prove difficult and acrimonious but ultimately successful. David Owen continued on his own path with the SDP but eventually that party was wound up. In this part of the book, Ashdown is not afraid to protray himself warts and all - admitting to the affair with his aide that let to him being called even occasionally today (more than 25 years later ) as Paddy Pants Down.
The 1992 election was looking to be a close call (in the end Kinnock's triumphalism was premature as John Major won with a tiny minority) . In the run up to the election, Ashdown considered what it would take to go into a coalition government wisely, unlike his successor in 2010 ( Nick Clegg) he always stood by the rule that in setting conditions for coalition PR was not negotiable as he recognised the weakness of the smaller party in any coalition (the book was written 2009 - Clegg should perhaps have read it!). A surprising follow up here was the possibilty of coalition with Blair's labour in 1997. Ashdown claims that Blair wanted a coalition and could be persuaded over PR. It seems that negotiotions went on for over a year after Blair's landslide victory but I cannot conceive how Blair could have, or even needed, got a coalition past his labour colleagues when he had a huge Parliamentary majority.
Unable to get Blair to commit, Ashdown took the opportunity to step aside as Leader but remained close to Blair. A result of this was his support (which he admits here was wrong) for the Iraq war; his appointment to the House of Lords and UN High Representative (effectively pro-consul) for Bosnia Herzegovina; and even a US request for hime to act as advisor to the Afghan Government of Karzai (proposed by Condoleeza Rice but which Karzai scotched).
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