Paddy Ashdown

Paddy Ashdown, Liberal Democrat politician

Jeremy John Durham Ashdown, Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, GCMG CH KBE PC (born 27 February 1941), usually known as Paddy Ashdown, is a British politician and former diplomat. He is the current Chair of the Liberal Democrats 2015 General Election team.

After serving as a Royal Marine and as an intelligence officer in the UK security services, Paddy Ashdown became a Member of Parliament (MP) for Yeovil from 1983 to 2001, and Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 until August 1999; later he served as International High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 27 May 2002 to 30 May 2006, following his vigorous lobbying for military action against Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A polyglot, Ashdown has an interpretership qualification in Mandarin Chinese and is fluent in several other languages.

Lord Ashdown has received national recognition for his services by appointment as 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.

Opposition leader should oppose

Patrick Haseldine's letter was published 14 days before the Lockerbie Bombing

In the Observer of Sunday 11 December 1988, Richard Ingrams wrote:

I switched on the Today Programme last week to hear a nicely spoken man being cross-examined about the silly plan to make local government candidates in Ulster sign a renunciation of violence before they can stand for office. The man, whom I assumed to be a junior Government Minister of some kind, defended the measure as best he could, saying that he was sure it would be a useful weapon in the battle against terrorism and one which was bound to reduce violence.

"Thank you Mr Ashdown," the interviewer concluded after a minute or two. It turned out, to my great surprise, that the speaker was the newly-elected leader of the Democrats and the man who has pledged himself to replace Mr Neil Kinnock as the Leader of the Opposition. Paddy Ashdown appears not to have grasped the point that the job of an Opposition leader is to oppose. In this respect, there is nothing to choose between him and his rival Dr David Owen.

Owen is a natural Tory, as he showed again last week over the case of Mr Patrick Haseldine, the Foreign Office official, who in a letter to The Guardian last week made a splendid kamikaze attack on Mrs Thatcher for indulging in 'self-righteous invective' over the Patrick Ryan case.

Instead of taking up Mr Haseldine's point and using it as a stick to beat the Government with, as any good Opposition leader would have done, Dr Goody-Two-Shoes called for Haseldine's immediate dismissal.