Jeremy John Durham Ashdown, Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (27 February 1941 – 22 December 2018), better known as Paddy Ashdown, was a British politician and diplomat who served as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 to 1999. Internationally, he is recognised for his role as High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006, following his vigorous lobbying for military action against Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Ashdown had an interpretership qualification in Mandarin and was fluent in several other languages, including Malay, German, French and Bosnian. After serving as a Royal Marine and Special Boat Service officer and as an intelligence officer in the UK security services, Ashdown was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Yeovil in 1983 and was re-elected three times before retiring in 2001.
Ashdown was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) in the 2006 New Year Honours and Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2015 New Year Honours. In 2017, Ashdown was appointed Officer of the Legion of Honour by the French government.
Ashdown was the eldest of seven children: four brothers and two sisters. He was born in New Delhi, British India, on 27 February 1941 to a family of soldiers and colonial administrators who spent their lives in India. His father was a lapsed Catholic, and his mother a Protestant. His mother (née Hudson) was a nurse in the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps. Ashdown's father, John William Richard Durham Ashdown (1909–1980), was a British Indian Army officer who served in the 14th Punjab Regiment and the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, and in 1944 attained the rank of temporary lieutenant colonel.
Ashdown was primarily brought up in Northern Ireland, where his father bought a farm in 1945 near Comber, County Down. He was educated first at a local primary school, then as a weekly boarder at Garth House Preparatory School in Bangor. Finally, from the age of 11, he was educated at Bedford School, an all-boys public school (i.e. independent boarding school) in England, where his accent earned him the nickname "Paddy".
Royal Marines and Special Boat Section
After his father's business collapsed, Ashdown passed the naval scholarship examination to pay for his school fees, but left before taking A-levels and joined the Royal Marines in 1959. He served until 1972 and retired with the rank of captain. He served in Borneo during the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation and the Persian Gulf, before training as a Swimmer Canoeist in 1965, after which he joined the elite Special Boat Section (now named the Special Boat Service) and commanded a Section in the Far East. He then went to Hong Kong in 1967 to undertake a full-time interpreter's course in Chinese, and returned to the UK in 1970 when he was given command of a Royal Marine company in Belfast.
Intelligence officer and diplomat
Ashdown left the Royal Marines to join the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). As diplomatic cover, he worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. At the UN, Ashdown was responsible for relations with several UN organisations, involved in the negotiation of several international treaties, and some aspects of the Helsinki Accords in 1975.
While in the Marines, Ashdown had been a supporter of the Labour Party but switched support to the Liberal Party in 1975. He had a comfortable life in Switzerland, where he lived with his wife Jane and their two children, Simon and Katherine, in a large house on the shores of Lake Geneva, enjoying plenty of time for sailing, skiing and climbing. Ashdown decided to enter politics after the UK had two general elections in one year (those of February and October 1974) and the Three-Day Week. He said that, "most of my friends thought it was utterly bonkers" to leave the diplomatic service, but that he had "a sense of purpose".
In 1976 Ashdown was selected as the Liberal Party's prospective parliamentary candidate in his wife's home constituency of Yeovil in Somerset, and took a job with Normalair Garrett, then part of the Yeovil-based Westland Group. Yeovil's Liberal candidate had been placed second in the February 1974 and third in the October 1974 general elections; Ashdown's objective was to "squeeze" the local Labour vote to enable him to defeat the Conservatives, who had held the seat since its creation in 1918. He subsequently worked for Tescan, and was unemployed for a time after that firm's closure in 1981, before becoming a youth worker with Dorset County Council's Youth Service, working on initiatives to help the young unemployed. That position being an unpaid "volunteer" one, Ashdown was at the time classified as "long-term unemployed", having applied unsuccessfully for 150 jobs.
At the 1979 general election, which returned the Conservatives to power, Ashdown regained second place, establishing a clear lead of 9% over the Labour candidate. The Conservative majority of 11,382 was still large enough to be regarded as a safe seat when the sitting MP John Peyton stood down at the 1983 general election to be made a life peer. Ashdown had gained momentum after his years of local campaigning. The Labour vote fell to only 5.5% and Ashdown won the seat with a majority of over 3,000, a swing from the Conservatives of 11.9% against a national swing of 4% to the Conservatives.
Ashdown had long been on his party's social democratic wing, supporting the 1977 Lib–Lab pact, and the SDP–Liberal Alliance. In the early 1980s, he was a prominent campaigner against the deployment in Europe of American nuclear-armed cruise missiles, describing them at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in Hyde Park in 1983 as "the front end of the whole anti-nuclear struggle. It is the weapon we have to stop."
Shortly after entering the House of Commons, he was appointed SDP–Liberal Alliance spokesman on trade and industry and then on education. He opposed the privatisation of the Royal Ordnance Factories in 1984, criticised the Thatcher government in 1986 for allowing the United States to bomb Libya from UK bases, and campaigned against the loss of trade union rights by workers at GCHQ in 1987.
When the Liberal Party merged in 1988 with the Social Democrats to form the Social and Liberal Democrats (their name shortened in 1989 to "Liberal Democrats"), he was elected as the new party's leader and made a Privy Councillor in January 1989.
Ashdown led the Liberal Democrats into two general elections, in 1992 and 1997, and three European Parliament elections, in 1989, 1994 and 1999. The Lib Dems failed to win any seats in the 1989 European Parliament election. They recorded a net loss of two seats in the 1992 general election when the party was still recovering from the after-effects of the 1988 merger. In 1994, the party gained its first two Members of the European Parliament. At the 1997 election, the Liberal Democrats won 46 seats, their best performance since the Liberal Party in the 1920s. However, they took a smaller share of the vote than in the 1992 election. While the Liberal Democrats vote share decreased in the 1999 European Parliament election, the move from first-past-the-post to the D'Hondt method saw the party make a net gain of 8 seats.
Between 1993 and 1997, he was a notable proponent of cooperation between the Liberal Democrats and "New Labour" and had regular secret meetings with Tony Blair to discuss the possibility of a coalition government. This was despite Labour's opinion poll showings from late 1992 onwards, virtually all suggesting that they would gain a majority at the next election, particularly in the first year or so of Blair's leadership following his appointment in mid-1994. The discussions began in early 1993, while the party was still being led by Blair's predecessor John Smith, who died suddenly in May 1994. After Blair was elected as Labour leader, the talks continued.