A Fortunate Life
by Paddy Ashdown
(Aurum Press / 400pp. / £20)
Review by Simon Kovar
September 2009
PADDY Ashdown writes of a recurring memory from childhood, “the brief glimpse, snatched from between the folds of my mother’s skirt, of a single platform under a boiling sun, carpeted with dismembered bodies”. The place was Bombay, India; the year, 1946; the scene, a fragment of the communal slaughters that accompanied Partition. A half-century later, Ashdown found this memory evoked by the horrors of the Bosnian war, a war tolerated and sustained by the “shameless inactivity” of the West. It is, he ponders, “the theme of my life”: to be not only a witness to the consequences of tribal violence, but also to challenge the complicity that allows such hatred to prosper.
One reviewer of this book complained that it fails to give a convincing postulation of Ashdown’s liberalism; but that seems to ignore the importance of a liberal life lived. Ashdown was born in 1941, the product of a mixed marriage amid the divisions of Northern Ireland. His beloved father taught him to revile religious bigotry, to be unafraid of holding minority opinions, and that actions – not the accidents of birth – define character. Later, Ashdown imbibed the value of mutuality in the Royal Marines and found himself bombarded by both sides of the sectarian divide as a soldier patrolling the streets of Belfast. The name ‘Paddy’, a derogatory reference to his Irish origins, followed him from an English public school into the armed forces, and he adopted it as his own; a literal inversion of the prejudice that he was determined to combat. He draws his creed from Tagore: “We are all the more one, because we are many”. This is Ashdown’s liberalism, and it was there – like “an old coat that had been hanging in my cupboard” – long before he joined the Liberal Party in 1974.
Ashdown comments frequently on his “naiveté” in picking causes, such as trying to set up a non-sectarian youth club in 1970s Belfast, and he emerges as a figure wary of the seemingly minor compromises that, over time, amount to far greater betrayals. It is hard in reading these pages to avoid pondering what Britain missed in never giving Ashdown the opportunity to serve as Prime Minister. One would forgive him the temptation of emulating his predecessor as Liberal candidate for Yeovil who, upon losing his deposit in the 1945 general election, declaimed: “People of Yeovil, you have been handed the keys of liberty and you have dashed them to the ground!”.
As a politician, Ashdown practised ‘community politics’ in its original mode; as a means of realising universal goals on a local level. He had little time for the petty side of parliamentary politics and lamented the parochial attitude of those Liberal MPs who were simply “outstanding personalities in their own constituencies”. He was a devoted advocate for his constituents but was not afraid to challenge their prejudices even if in doing so he courted unpopularity. He chastised residents who opposed a local care home for children with learning difficulties, and opposed the creation of local jobs where these relied on arms sales to Pinochet. When racist thugs threatened the business of a local Bangladeshi restaurant-owner, Ashdown personally went on patrol, directly confronted the individuals involved and disarmed one who held a knife to his throat. (It is hard not to enjoy the thought of a racist knife-wielder getting his comeuppance at the hands of an ex-SBS Royal Marine). As Liberal Democrat leader, Ashdown adopted George Lansbury’s dictum that opposition parties should avoid populist opportunism and act as they would do in government; hence his support for the residency rights of Hong Kong Chinese, and the votes cast by Liberal Democrat MPs under his leadership for the Maastricht Treaty. Ashdown’s repeated calls for intervention in Bosnia earned him the derisive nickname ‘Honourable Member for Sarajevo’ as well as calls of ‘warmonger’ from Labour MPs in the Commons; yet events vindicated his stand, and he never waivered in face of this opposition.
Where he seems to have fallen down, curiously, was as a political strategist, seeking to map Liberal Democrat positioning in a political landscape dominated by the phenomenon of Tony Blair. To begin with, it seems odd that a man with such an instinctive sense of what liberalism is about should have supported ‘Democrats’ as the name for the newly-created merger party in 1988. He admits to not having appreciated at first the extent to which the ‘Liberal’ label was part of the party’s – not to say the country’s – “heart, history and soul”, and could not be so lightly discarded. Then there was Ashdown’s ‘partnership’ with Blair; seeking, as he saw it, to mend the post-Edwardian disunity of the Left. Ashdown credits this partnership as having contributed to the scale of the Conservative defeat in 1997 and for keeping Blair on the straight-and-narrow as regards constitutional reform. He argues that by working with Blair – for example through key seats agreements and by coordinating attacks on the Conservatives – the Liberal Democrats became a part of the anti-Tory tide in 1997 rather than being consumed by it. These arguments are credible. The problem is that ‘the Project’ extended far beyond these essentially pragmatic objectives. Ashdown regards 2nd May 1997, when Blair balked at inviting Liberal Democrats to join his government, as an opportunity lost. While cooperation seems to have paid dividends in the general election of that year, Ashdown seems less keen to contemplate the extent to which his pursuit of coalition post-1997 hampered the prospects of further growth in Liberal Democrat support. One is further struck by the conspiratorial nature of ‘the Project’ – Ashdown writes of the slowly expanding circle of those in the know – and the seeming lack of concern for the implications of ‘big tent’ politics for the very pluralism to which Ashdown is so passionately committed.
As the late Conrad Russell observed at the time, coalitions only work if based on a partnership of interest. “A party with a majority of 179 does not need a coalition”, he wrote in 1998. “Its only possible interests in entering one are to free the Prime Minister from the control of his party, or to nobble a possible competitor”. Ashdown believes that the presence of Liberal Democrats in government post-1997 would have tamed Blair’s illiberal tendencies; but this only begs the question of why a coalition government not based on party interests could be justified in the additional absence of a commonality of principles. He seems to have been much more clear headed a decade later when invited to join Gordon Brown’s government as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Lib Dem leader at the time, Sir Menzies Campbell, was in discussions with the Prime Minister and appeared ready to contemplate a coalition, even in the absence of Ashdown’s bottom line of an agreed policy programme and a commitment to electoral reform. Ashdown saw this as “madness”: “How can I be in your Cabinet and subject to collective responsibility, when you are about to do further terrible damage to our civil liberties to which I and my party are totally opposed?”, he asked Brown. “Moreover, if I was in his Cabinet, this would also greatly diminish my party’s capacity to oppose his Government when it became necessary to do so”. Ashdown asked further of Brown: “Are you sure that this is not what you wanted: to emasculate the Lib Dems, rather than forming a partnership with them?”. All points that one might have made to Blair circa-1997.
The real triumph of Ashdown’s career must be his contribution to the peace and prosperity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. More than any other UK politician in the early- and mid-1990s, Ashdown understood the implications of a conflict which saw once again, on European soil, “the use of railway wagons as instruments of ‘ethnic cleansing’”. He writes: “Europe’s failure to intervene I saw – and still see – as the greatest act of moral failure and deliberate, culpable blindness of our time. I also saw the Bosnia war as, in some way, our generation’s Spanish Civil War”. He rails against the inaction of Western democracies, in particular the decision not to defend the so-called ‘safe havens’ – a move advocated by both Prime Minister John Major and Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. Ashdown visited Sarajevo twice a year during the four year siege of the city, smuggled in supplies and letters, and as international High Representative and EU Special Representative from 2001, helped set the country on the path to European Union membership. The best part of this book is Ashdown’s deeply moving diary account of his visit to Srebrenica in July 2005, a testament both to a country and people he loves and to the nobility of his humanitarian worldview.
In Bosnia, Ashdown sought to defend a rich, plural, multi-ethnic society against extreme tribalism. Prior to a particularly dangerous run into a besieged Sarajevo in 1995, he wrote a letter to his wife which was to be delivered only in the event of his death. “There are”, he wrote, “…two things which drive me (both will sound pompous) – justice – and I genuinely believe a great injustice has been done to the Bosnian people – and my liberal beliefs. Internationalism is the core of the latter and, if our Party will not stand up for this, who will?”.
Simon Kovar is a Contributing Editor of The Liberal.
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