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From bullets to ballots, and being caught with his pants down... the adventures of Paddy Ashdown
From soldier, spy and youth worker to businessman and peacemaker... Paddy Ashdown has perhaps lived more lives than any other politician. Sheena Hastings met him for a Yorkshire Post OutLoud programme.
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PADDY Ashdown, born Jeremy John Durham Ashdown and latterly Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, likens himself to Rudyard Kipling's Cat That Walked By Himself.
Whether at his minor public school, in the Royal Marines and later the Special Boat Service (SBS) or in any of the other trades he has plied, he has always stood alone, choosing his friends rather than having them foisted upon him by his job.
"I'm not a clubbable person. I do need human company, but clubs don't interest me. I've always been comfortable making my own decisions and carving out my own path. At times it did make life uncomfortable at Westminster, but I was comfortable with that discomfort."
Lord Ashdown likes a quotable quote or three, and an hour's conversation with him is scattered with these bons mots.
He follows Kipling with Mark Twain, Blaise Pascal, General Montgomery, Gladstone (naturally), French novelist Marcel Pagnol and Oscar Wilde, borrowing from that highly fertile source: "I can resist anything but temptation."
To be fair, this one suits him to a tee. He laughingly agrees
that he has never been able to resist a humungous challenge, the more seemingly impossible the better.
Take on the "unwinnable" Tory seat of Yeovil and win? Well, it was a seven-year campaign, but he did it and kept it for 18 years.
Pick up the tattered remnants of the Liberal/SDP alliance and lead the party out of severe financial difficulties? For 11 years from 1988, Paddy Ashdown rode the rollercoaster and made the newly renamed Liberal Democrats an increasingly listened-to third force in British politics.
Maybe all that bivouac activity in the jungle, leading his commandos through scorpion-infested terrain and negotiating mountain precipices, is the ideal training for political life.
Perhaps all those eager young MPs with little more than a couple of degrees and internships under their belts, should take note of the parallels between running a team in both combat and retreat before casting themselves to the howling wolves of Parliament.
Refusing his wife Jane's delicious-looking quiche and munching on a digestive instead, Paddy Ashdown reflects on this. He's about to publish his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, and by the end of it he says he reached the conclusion that the lack of a personal hinterland before politics was indeed a problem.
"Most of the politicians who tell us how to live our lives have never experienced the life we lead. I'm absolutely sure that the accidental happening of becoming an MP having been a soldier, businessman, spy, unemployed, and youth worker, means that I've had a set of experiences which enabled me to do the job better. They were, in a sense, apprenticeships. Maybe there's a lesson there for politics at large."
Being a leader of men was about testing the limits of the possible, Lord Ashdown says. He admits to having had a love/hate relationship with politics, though. He loved the community involvement of the constituency and the campaign trail; he hated the dogfight of the chamber of the House of Commons, and also admits he never had the necessary command of wit and repartee to feel confident with the ordeal of parliamentary questions.
His most excruciating personal moment was the "Paddy Pantsdown" affair, when the press got hold of details of an affair he had had years before (and denied to his wife) with his then-secretary Tricia Howard.
He says he, Jane and their two children had got through the scandal "with great difficulty... but my family are big people."
Other than that, his lowest moment was when the Lib Dems polled less than five per cent in European elections in 1991. "At that moment I told my people that if we put one more foot wrong it would be the last straw. I really feared that the party of Gladstone would end with Ashdown."
Since standing down as leader in 2001, at the age of 60, Paddy Ashdown has tacked other "impossible" jobs, including spending four years as the UN's High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a region which had become an increasing personal obsession during his time at Westminster.
Although the time he spent in Bosnia was criticised by some, he says his involvement was entirely consistent with being a Liberal, and being a seasoned soldier made him unafraid to go far further into the war zone than other politicians might have ventured. "If my attention was drawn to an issue, I always wanted to get out there and see for myself. It was the same with Bosnia I had to go and find out more. It became an emotional attachment.
"It was the Spanish Civil War of our time... and the predictor of other wars that were coming. There was laid on top of this a terrible human tragedy.
"I wouldn't put myself on the same level as him, but Gladstone became similarly emotionally involved in the Balkan atrocities. Liberals are internationalists, so this kind of thing is part of our way of thinking."
He acknowledges the irony that it was this activity in Bosnia and, even more so, his opinions on the first Gulf War, which made him more recognisable to the public, rather than his efforts to find an increasingly meaningful place for liberal thinking in British politics.
"I regard that as the first moment when people got a picture of me and thought 'Ah yes, I see now who Paddy Ashdown is a person who understands foreign policy and understands war because he has been a soldier. Therefore we'll listen to what he has to say'."
In 2007, he turned down the offer of the Northern Ireland brief in Gordon Brown's putative "government of all the talents", an offer made shortly before Brown became PM.
Lord Ashdown said at the time that even if his leader agreed, he couldn't do it, because it would be "like adding a Lib Dem bungalow annexe to Downing Street", rather than building partnership government.
Typically unable to say no to another tough job, he agreed to accept nomination for a role as UN envoy to Afghanistan, but withdrew after "entirely legitimate objections" (Ashdown's words) were raised by the government of Hamid Karzai.
He currently leads a panel considering the issues of parading in his native Northern Ireland, and has a portfolio of other interests on the go that keep him on as many planes and trains as ever, he says.
"The game now is that I pretend to be retired and Jane pretends to believe me," he says jovially. He fears idleness, and is making notes for a thriller (a seventh book) he intends to write.
It was Paddy Ashdown who first dubbed Gordon Brown as Heathcliff, but he also calls him a "wild Highland chief" who "sends hatchet men out to do the work of the tribe."
Lately he says he sees the PM more as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, "strapped to the wheel, granite-faced and looking into the storm..."
And another sharp observation of Brown: "All politicians are misshapen you have to be to want your face on all those posters but Gordon is more misshapen than most."
Looking to the future, he doesn't think the next election is necessarily lost to Labour.
"Actually, I think however much you might like to dislike Gordon, the truth is that if he leads us past the shoals and rocks, and if he can convince us by the end of this year or early next year that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train, but the end of the storm, then he'll have a proposition to put to us that's quite interesting."
Lord Ashdown is highly sceptical of David Cameron's support, which he says is wide but not deep. "I can't think of a previous time when the fall of a government was attended by such a paucity of ideas and lack of clarity of narrative from the opposition. That's what makes it such an interesting time."
One of his chief fears is that a prolonged recession will mean a rise in extreme right-wing feeling, followed by a swing to the right in mainstream politics.
Paddy Ashdown describes himself as the kind of former leader who's happy to do his own thing but will help when asked. He doesn't say whether Nick Clegg has asked his advice, but does shower the Sheffield MP in praise, describing him as "a rare talent".
"I'm quite confident that when the spotlight of a general election falls on the three leaders, people will know what Gordon Brown is and I don't think they'll be terrifically enamoured.
"I think they'll see through Mr Cameron, or at least what he is offering. And when they start looking more closely at Nick Clegg they'll see a person of exceptional talent. I suspect that's when we'll start to see him being taken much more seriously by the public."
No doubt Paddy Ashdown will be called upon to cash in the goodwill he built up over 18 years by canvassing for the party. In the meantime he's not too busy to be a tad philosophical.
He tells himself that 68 is the new 35, but there's a slight wistfulness about him despite the military posture and apparent energy of a man a couple of decades younger.
"It is strange, writing a biography is a moment of closure in a way. You have to try and make some sense of what this thing has been about and there's a tinge of sadness about that. You know that the feast is coming to a close... and I have to confess a tremor about what comes next."
A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown is published by Aurum on April 28, 20. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or visit www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage costs 2.75.
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