Constituency : Yeovil 1983-2001
The Liberals added another MP to their ranks from the South West as Paddy won Yeovil from the Tories at the second attempt.
Paddy was born as Jeremy Ashdown in New Delhi. His parents were both in the army, his mother as a nurse. His father reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1944. In 1945 his father bought a farm in Northern Ireland and moved the family there. He picked up the name "Paddy" at Bedford School in England due to his accent. He cut short his education due to family financial problems and joined the Royal Marines in 1959, serving for 13 years and reaching the rank of captain. Most of his time was spent in the far east. In the mid-sixties he joined the Special Boat Section. In 1967 he attended a Chinese interpreter's course in Hong Kong. He served his last two years in Belfast. In 1972 he joined MI6 with a diplomatic job at the United Nations in Geneva as cover. He was initially a Labour supporter but was converted to the Liberals by a doorstep activist in 1975. He quit the service and returned to the UK to pursue a political career. He found a job with the helicopter firm Westland while nursing the constituency of Yeovil including holding surgeries before he actually became the MP.
Paddy was touted as a potential leader almost straightaway and he made successful appearances on Question Time. He appealed to the party's left wing by opposing the deployment of cruise missiles with a strong speech at the party's assembly in 1984. By the following year he had moved towards a more moderate position and earned the nickname "Paddy Backdown" from his erstwhile allies. He supported the Sikorsky bid during the Westland crisis.
Paddy supported the merger with the SDP and became the first leader of the Liberal Democrats in 1988 defeating Alan Beith. His first two years were very difficult as he had to deal with the fall-out from the merger including the challenge from the continuing SDP under David Owen , a protracted dispute over the name of the party and a disastrous showing in the 1989 European elections where they were pushed into fourth place by the Greens. He also spent too much time on the unpopular issue of visa for refugees from Hong Kong
Events started moving Paddy's way in 1990. First, Owen's party collapsed after the Bootle by-election. Then the Gulf War made him much in demand as a TV pundit and the public liked what it saw of him. At the end of the year , victory in the Eastborne by-election made the party a potent electoral force once more.
Just before the 1992 election, Paddy's affair with his secretary five years earlier was exposed , earning him the nickname "Paddy Pantsdown" but it did him little electoral harm. The Liberal Democrats punched above their weight in the campaign forcing Neil Kinnock to equivocate on proportional representation. However they were hit by the last minute surge towards John Major and finished with a slight dip in seats compared to the Alliance totin 1987. He and Major were actually close friends by this point.
Paddy decided to end the policy of equi-distance between the other parties and began conferring with Labour, a process that picked up pace when Tony Blair replaced John Smith in 1994. He also spent much time in Bosnia-Herzegovina castigating the western allies for their failure to intervene militarily against the Serbs. This gave rise to one of my favourite political jokes, the one about his answering machine telling callers to leave a message after the high moral tone.
Blair's moderation gave Paddy some space to position himself as more radical in 1997 and despite a drop in vote share the Liberal Democrats more than doubled their number of seats, partly down to a secret deal with Labour to encourage tactical voting in certain constituencies. Paddy secured PR for the European elections in 1999 but after that he realised Blair was not going to go any further with political realignment and decided to step down as leader in 1999.
Paddy stood down in Yeovil in 2001. He published diaries detailing the secret talks with Blair over the next couple of years He was created Baron Ashdown and in 2002 was appointed the U.N.s High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, the de facto ruler of the divided territory. When he left the role in 2007, Gordon Brown wanted him to join the Cabinet as Northern Ireland Secretary but he declined due to party opposition.
Paddy initially expressed misgivings about the coalition with the Tories but came round to the idea. He chaired the doomed 2015 election campaign and was famous for his declaration that he would eat his hat if the BBC exit poll correctly predicting the party's annihilation was correct. He later consumed a hat -shaped chocolate cake.
He was diagnosed with bladder cancer in October 2018 and died two months later aged 77.
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