A Fortunate Life (28 page)

I cannot, at this distance remember the precise moment when Jane and I finally decided that I should leave my job and go into politics. It happened very slowly over the two-and-a-half years we were in Geneva. One contributory factor was certainly that I found it increasingly painful trying to represent my country during the political chaos of 1974, with its two elections and its three-day weeks, when the international standing of Britain, already widely regarded as ‘the sick man of Europe', was at rock bottom. I increasingly came to feel that there was not much point living a life of diplomatic ease, if the country you were trying to represent was falling apart before your eyes.

But not all my home thoughts from abroad were so altruistic. I also found that, though I enjoyed my job, understood its importance and greatly respected my colleagues, I increasingly wanted to have my own ball at my own feet, rather than, as a civil servant, kicking around somebody else's.

And so it was that, in February 1975, while on three weeks home leave from Geneva, I called in (on my birthday, as it happened) to see the then Chairman of the Yeovil Liberals, Brian Andrews, and told him that I was a supporter and, if ever I could be of assistance, I would like to help. I explained that, as a civil servant, I could take no active part in politics, but I could and would be happy to offer discreet advice on foreign-policy matters if ever it was needed. ‘What a pity,' he replied. ‘We are due to select our new candidate tonight. If only we had known you were available!' I responded rather sharply that he had completely misunderstood. I could
not
take an active part in politics. I had no interest whatsoever in being their candidate – just in helping behind the scenes, if they wanted it. And so our conversation ended.

That May the previous Yeovil Liberal Candidate, the much respected Dr Geoffrey Taylor, came to Geneva for a World Health Organisation conference and asked to see me. We invited him to lunch and, under a
glorious May sky, sitting in our garden by the lake in Maison Kundig, he explained that the candidate the Yeovil Liberals had selected in February had also been selected (without their knowledge) for the Newbury seat and had decided that, Newbury being the better prospect, he would abandon Yeovil. So they were without a candidate again. Would I be interested? I cannot recall what answer I gave him, but it must have appeared to him to be at least mildly positive, for from then on he was in almost weekly contact trying to persuade me to put my name forward.

Slowly, over the summer of 1975, Jane and I took the decision that I would resign from the Foreign Office and go into politics. Most of our friends and colleagues, understanding the realities of the situation better than me, thought I was completely mad. Our closest friends were kind, but you could see even they thought we were mad, too. There were only three exceptions to this: George Steiner, a Geneva friend who was, at the time, Professor of English Literature at Geneva University; a close colleague in the UK Mission, Colin McColl (later to become a highly successful and much respected head of MI6); and the then Danish Ambassador to Geneva. The last told us he had wanted to do the same but had left it too late. ‘You have to do this before your children go away to boarding school. If you leave it later, and they are already at boarding school, then you have to be very rich to be able to pay for it.' (Boarding school fees for both British and Danish diplomats were paid by their governments.) This latter argument weighed heavily with us, especially Jane, who was dreading the parting with our children that would have been necessary if I had stayed in the Foreign Service.

I have no doubt that, with responsibility for a wife and two young children, this decision to leave a well-paid career in which I believe I had a future for the insecurities of political life – especially as a Liberal candidate in a seat which had been Tory for half a century – was naive to the point of irresponsibility. It just happens also to be the best decision I have made in my life.

At the end of 1975 I formally gave in my notice. My employers fixed the time for our departure from Geneva as July the following year, adding that they would welcome me back at any time up to my forty-third birthday (I was thirty-five at the time).

These last months of our time in Geneva were not uneventful. One of my duties in the shadows involved Jane and me paying a visit to Vienna just before Christmas 1975, travelling by night sleeper across
snow-covered Switzerland and Austria. We were ostensibly there on a short holiday, which, to add verisimilitude, included a visit to the State Opera, where they were putting on a performance of Verdi's
Aida
. For us this was not an onerous addition to our schedule, for we had by this time become keen opera fans, though with a strong preference for Mozart over Verdi (and no preference at all for Wagner, after seeing
Tristan und Isolde
on a boiling hot summer's evening in Lausanne, when Jane slept through almost the whole three hours, then woke up, burst into tears over the ‘Liebestod' and left after the final curtain – all in the space of twenty minutes). All opera requires from its audience a certain ability to suspend disbelief, which is no doubt why comic operas tend to work better than serious ones – and why even serious ones can swiftly descend into comedy if things go wrong. On this occasion, Aida, the Ethiopian slave girl, was played by a voluptuous American soprano of very ample proportions. Radames, her lover, however, was a diminutive Italian with a torso so emaciated he looked as if he had been starved and legs so well developed they appeared to belong to someone else. He also had the wobbliest thighs I have ever seen – and they wobbled a great deal when he was borne in, on what appeared to be a Chinese restaurant table top, through cheering crowds for the triumphal entry into Thebes. I made manful attempts to believe it all, up to the point when, in a moment of passion, he was clasped between the bosoms of Aida, which engulfed his whole body from the waist upwards and completely swallowed up his voice along with it. The former only reappeared when unclasped, while the latter re-emerged, after a short pause, as a thin squeak from above the proscenium arch. At this point we both got a fit of uncontrollable giggles and had to leave, amid sternly disapproving looks from the more serious-minded burghers of Vienna.

There were tragedies, too. Tina, our dog rescued from the clay pits of Devon was wonderfully intelligent and obedient. But she was also a great hunter and was deaf to all instructions when she put up game. And this was what eventually did for her. She adored our walks in the mountains where she would often put up chamois and other mountain deer. One day, when we were walking on the edge of some forest in the Bernese Oberland, she put up a chamois and gave chase. It was the last we ever saw of her. Chamois, when chased, have a habit of taking their pursuers into forest or thick scrub and then running straight for any nearby cliff, jinking at the last moment and leaving
their pursuer to go over the edge. There was indeed a cliff nearby, and I presume that this is what must have happened to my beloved dog. I searched the whole of the cliff face, high and low, for two days, but never found her. I left my telephone number with a local huntsman, together with my walking jacket to comfort her in case she was found. But she never was. We were all completely heartbroken.

Not long afterwards, our cat Boney was returning home from some mischief or other in Coppet village when she saw Kate, whom she adored, and ran across the road to greet her. A car ran straight over her and killed her instantly in front of Kate, who wept for her for days afterwards.

So there were only four of us in the car when, after an exhausting round of farewell parties, the time came to go home in July 1976 to start yet another new adventure, this time in the world of politics.

T
HERE IS AN OLD
Somerset saying: ‘If November ice will bear a duck, the rest of the winter will be slush and muck.’ As 1976 neared its end it brought just such a November. The evening of 16 November was thick with fog and white with frost as Kate, Simon, Jane and I left Vane Cottage, with instructions to be in the Liberal Hall in Crewkerne by 7.30. We were going to the event for which I had resigned from the Foreign Office, returned home from Geneva and was now unemployed: the meeting of the Yeovil Constituency Liberal Party, called for the formal adoption of a new Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC).

We had been informed there were to be two candidates for them to choose from: Dr Maureen Castle, a psychologist from Devon, and myself. But at the very last moment the Doctor had withdrawn, giving the dense fog as her excuse. Common sense would have been a more compelling reason – for neither the Liberals nor the Yeovil Constituency could be considered enticing prospects for those with political ambitions.

Like every other politician, I have many times been accused of ‘only being in politics for what I could get out of it’. I like to point out to my accusers that, on that night, when I formally entered politics for the Liberal cause in Yeovil, the Tories had held the seat with overwhelming majorities for 63 years. Moreover, the local Liberals consistently came third in elections at every level; the Party nationally was at less than 10% in the polls; Liberal candidates were most famous for losing their deposits and regularly came behind those of both Britain’s fascist Parties, the National Front and the National Party. And my Party leader, Jeremy Thorpe, was just about to be arraigned at the Old Bailey for conspiracy to murder. On this night at least, it would have been perfectly reasonable to accuse me of gigantic naivety, or wild romanticism – or even plain stupidity – but not, I think, of that kind of overriding ambition which regards principle as a necessary casualty in the battle for the main chance.

The truth was that, in Yeovil, the Liberals had almost no chance. My old friend and later House of Commons colleague, the much
loved and still sorely missed David Penhaligon, used to say that he won Truro for the Liberals because he was too naïve to know it was impossible. This was just as true of Yeovil. Over the next seven years, I would, in similar vein, remind my supporters of the famous (but perhaps apocryphal) Royal Aeronautical College examination question of the 1930s which gave students the full aerodynamic characteristics of the bumble bee, without naming it, and asked whether this creature could fly. The right answer was that it could not. But the bumble bee fortunately knows nothing of aerodynamics and manages to fly around quite adequately. One of my other favourite ‘cheer up the troops’ exhortations addressed to our small band of political desperadoes over the next seven years would be: ‘Don’t forget; Fidel Castro invaded Cuba with only eleven men!’

It was in exactly this spirit, and in high excitement, that Jane, Kate, Simon and I entered the Liberal Hall in Crewkerne that November night to submit ourselves to the judgement of Yeovil Constituency Liberals. I can still recall in almost perfect detail the scene that greeted us as we nervously entered the small hall. There were large gas fire panels suspended from the ceiling, which, though roaring away, did very little either to blunt the sharpness of the cold or to dispel the all-pervading smell of dampness. That smell, I was later to discover, is an endemic feature of all Liberal halls the country over, left behind from the Party’s heyday in the nineteenth century. They were great hall-builders, those nineteenth-century Liberals, and I often wonder whether, in reality, the politics of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, was not in the end decided in little halls like this.

If I had been in a mood to see it, I might also have recognised that some in the audience before me had, begging their pardon, seen better days, too. There were some fifty or so people in the room, amongst whom were a very few younger faces of about my own age. The great majority were advanced – some well advanced – in the generation ahead of me. David Penhaligon also used to say that when he went to Truro the average age of the membership was deceased. There was a touch of that in Yeovil as well.

But I noticed none of this. They appeared before me as a veritable battle-hardened, shining army, booted, spurred and breast-plated, waiting only for the bright standard I was about to raise before them
to begin our glorious, inevitable – and swift – march to victory. This was, moreover, my first political audience, and I was going to bring them to their feet in wild, stamping acclamation by the time I had finished my speech. This I had carefully prepared and still possess. It is of such earth-shattering banality that I can now scarcely bear to read it. One passage wasn’t bad however:

It did not, needless to say, bring them roaring to their feet, but it did elicit some polite applause, which nevertheless rang in my ears for days. After that there were some questions. And then they voted and – there being no other choice before them – concluded that I should be their candidate. The only hitch came when one of the Constituency notables – our only Councillor as it happened – said that they had, in my absence, decided that I should be known publicly as ‘Captain Jeremy Ashdown, Royal Marines retired’. This was the only moment in the entire proceedings when my feet briefly touched the ground. I replied that, in that case, they had better choose another candidate, for I would be known only as plain Paddy Ashdown. Since there was no other candidate, they decided to follow the logic of another of the Constituency notables who, during the ensuing discussion, suggested that they should accept my proposition – it didn’t really matter what I called myself, since we were never going to beat the Tories anyway.

The local paper, the
Western Gazette
, subsequently published the news of my selection as Liberal PPC in a small, three-column-inch article on page two, under the headline ‘Jungle fighter chosen as Yeovil’s Liberal Champion’. And
Liberal News
of 12 April 1976 published a small article on the last inside page, complete with a photograph, headlined ‘He gave up FO for Yeovil’. It said:

In the car on the way back home that night, I was elated, the kids were confused, and Jane was ominously silent. The truth is I had not the slightest idea what I had let myself in for.

Four months earlier, on 16 July, we had driven home from Geneva across a Europe gripped by the worst heat wave for twenty years and arrived in Portsmouth to find Britain burnt to crisp. The glorious green fields we had longed to see were sere and brown, and even the trees were dying for lack of water. Before leaving Geneva we had commissioned work to be done in Vane Cottage, against solemn promises from the builder that all would be safely and surely completed by the time we got home. But when we opened our front door the scene which greeted us was absolute chaos. The floorboards were up, there was a cement-mixer in the living room, the air was pungent with the smell of anti-parasite treatment, and the water and electricity were both turned off. To make matters worse, our builder informed us – with that whistling sound through the teeth that builders the world over use to prepare the unwary for an incoming bill of painful proportions – that he had discovered dry rot under our sitting-room floor, which would all have to come up and be replaced by concrete. It was not an auspicious homecoming.

What made things even less auspicious was that, when I rang the Yeovil Liberal Association to tell them that I had cut short my tour in Geneva as they had suggested and was back, ready to be selected and eager to get to work, they informed me that there was a hitch. Party Headquarters had told them that they could not just select me as they had proposed. There had to be a competition in order for the process to be legal. They would now have to advertise for other candidates and give time for responses. This would mean that they could not possibly select until the early autumn at the earliest. I did not say that I wished they had told me this earlier. Nor do I recall feeling angry about it – just frustrated that I could not get started.

I had, anyway, a lot to do: dealing with our house, getting the kids into schools and all the paraphernalia of settling back into Britain. And, above all there was the need to get a job.

Here I hit a problem. I could probably fairly easily have got a job in London. But I knew that I needed to be local, and not just a visitor to the constituency at weekends. Between August and December I tried
for dozens and dozens of jobs locally, but was always rejected. The problem was that I had made my political ambitions known publicly and did not try to hide them from prospective employers. And they, naturally, did not want to take on someone who, they not unreasonably suspected, might have more of his mind on politics than on working for them. In addition, as one of those to whom I applied has frankly admitted to me since, the local Tories, who counted nearly all Yeovil’s major employers amongst their supporters, passed the word around that it would be unhelpful to give me a job.

I was not at this stage financially worried about my position – for we had come back from Geneva with a pretty substantial financial cushion (we had some
£
12,000 in savings – a considerable sum in those days). But these constant rejections did severe damage to my self-confidence. I had presumed that, given my (as I saw it) brilliant careers and talents, I would be eagerly snapped up by local employers and, after no doubt opening a strawberry cream tea or two, would inevitably and probably swiftly be elected to Parliament. I was beginning, even if only dimly, to understand the position I had landed my family in and the harsh realities of life as a challenger in a safe seat – and especially as a Liberal, in Britain’s two-party electoral system.

I also filled some of this ‘dead’ time before (hopefully) being selected by trying to get some understanding and feel for the organisation to which I had now committed my life – Britain’s Liberal Party. I visited the national Headquarters, at that time housed in the rather dingy attic of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall Place. There I met the then Secretary General of the Party, Hugh Jones (known affectionately in the Party as ‘Huge Ones’), and the Candidates Officer, the redoubtable and delightful Janet Russell – who was to become a stalwart supporter and later told me (I suspect she was just being polite) that the moment I walked in the door she knew I was going to succeed in becoming an MP and would eventually lead the Party. Once again, my undiscerning eye glossed over what a sharper and more objective observer would have seen: that this was an underfunded and rather ramshackle organisation which compensated with commitment, dedication and enthusiasm for what it lacked in resources and efficiency. Much later I, in my turn, would come to rely on the extraordinary resilience and commitment of the Party’s members and servants to make good our weaknesses in money and facilities. Though I did not realise it at the time, I was also discovering
something else. That all my life I had, I thought, gained satisfaction from working among the elites – from mixing with those who were the best of the best of their profession. The Liberal Party and its members, then as now, do not pretend to be the elite. They are, for the most part, the very ordinary in the best sense of that word. And yet, somewhat to my surprise, I have felt a greater sense of privilege working with them, and been more humbled and inspired by what they were able to achieve through dedication, sacrifice and a refusal to accept the odds, than I ever felt amongst the elites of my previous careers.