A Fortunate Life

by Paddy Ashdown

  Thirdly, Blair and I shared a major deficiency. We were both, to some extent, strangers in our parties. Unlike Brown and Prescott (and there were many equivalents in the Lib Dems), we were outsiders not steeped in the cultures of the organisations we led. This caused both of us, I think, to conclude that, because something was logical, it was therefore achievable. In consequence, we perhaps underestimated the task of persuading organisations held together by a necessary tribalism to abandon this for the risks of partnership with others.

  Do I feel deceived by Blair?

  No. We always knew that whatever deals we made, both of us were governed by force majeure and the law of the possible. As it happens, it was Blair who had, in the end, to tell me that he could not carry his Cabinet on PR. If he had been able to do so, then it might very well have been me who would have had to tell him that I could not now carry my Party for a coalition. The fault here was not one of sincerity, but of underestimating the scale of the obstacles that we faced and an overestimation of our ability to overcome them.

  Do I regret making the attempt? No, not that either. I do blame myself for focusing so much on what was possible that I did not spot how much more improbable it had all become after the end of 1997. But I do not regret trying.

  Someone once said that, in big things, it is enough to have tried. I do not agree. It is precisely because a thing is big that trying is not enough; it is all the more necessary to succeed. And, though much was delivered along the way, we did not succeed in our stated aim of reuniting the Centre Left. Politics has returned to its same old shape and its same old ways. The best I can do is take some comfort from the fact that not to have tried in these unique circumstances would have been a dereliction of duty by both of us, but especially by me as the Leader of a third party whose raison d’être has always been to be the centre of a broad movement to bring liberal values into the Government of Britain.

  At the end of November I started actively to plan for my resignation. I had decided to announce this on 20 January the following year and to remain in post for five months as a caretaker Leader, while the Party fought the local elections in May, after which it would get down to the business of electing my successor.

  In December I paid another trip to Kosovo, this time with Shirley Williams. The international community had finally persuaded both sides into a ceasefire and installed a ‘Kosovo Verification Mission’ (KVM), which was unarmed and had little or no power. I never believed this would work and had said so, but I wanted to see things for myself on the ground. Shirley and I came away convinced that the ceasefire could never hold, and the KVM was too weak to enforce it. Before long, we said in our report to the Government, Kosovo would slide back to war.

  On 13 January, a week before my planned resignation date, Ming Campbell invited me to dine with him at the Reform Club. I knew he was thinking of standing as Leader when the time came and would probe me about my intentions. Sure enough, during dinner he asked me directly about my intentions. I fear I deceived him. I know that this upset him greatly later and led him to believe that I had somehow betrayed the bond of friendship between us. Ming was, and remains, a very close friend and was one of the key pillars upon whom I relied during my leadership years. But the duties of friendship, though great, do not in my view override the duties of leadership. The plain fact is that, if I had told Ming the truth that night, I would in effect have given him an advantage over others who might have wanted to stand for Leader in the coming contest, and this, I fear, I was just not prepared to do, even for a close and much admired friend.

  The announcement of my resignation on 20 January took everyone by surprise, including, I regret to say, one of my own MPs. Ed Davey, who was speaking in the Commons when the news broke (an hour or so prematurely), and, when asked by a Tory whether he knew I had resigned, replied that he didn’t, but that, even resigned, I was still a better Leader than the Tories had!

  Blair put out a very generous statement on the public announcement of my resignation, as did others. I also received a flood of kind letters and phone calls. Inevitably, some were less so:

  Dear Mr Ashdown,

  I will be sorry to see you go, but at least it will save me from the constant frustration and ever-mounting anger of listening to you talking perfect sense about the Balkans and being ignored by everyone that matters.

  Reluctantly I have come to the conclusion that you have been ignored because, although you talk sense about Bosnia and Kosovo, you talk bollocks about nearly everything else, particularly Europe and PR.

  Now that you are free and don’t have to pretend to embrace these dangerous notions, I hope that you will put some guts and gumption into British and European policies in the Balkans.

  Presumably the new House of Lords will be the correct place from which you will lead the world?

  Yours sincerely, etc.

  Dear Sir,

  Having found out that Paddy Ashdown is retiring, I wish to apply for the position of Liberal Democrat Party leader. Please grant me an interview. Attached is my CV.

  I want to start up the World Space Agency (WSA); the World Army (WA); UK’s National Union of Unions (NUU); school governors introducing the space industry; the UK space industry’s non-periscope submarine fleet which when permanently submerged will carry, launch and land mini-submarines; safer and economical improvements to NHS hospital treatment to babies and more District Council jobs;

  Thank you.

  Yours faithfully, etc.

  Dear Paddy,

  When you started you were third out of three. You finish third out of three. In the Jobcentre in Barrow St Helens, Merseyside, they are looking for bin men and street-cleaners.

  Yours, etc.

  The remaining five months of my leadership were very relaxed. Ever since 1976, when we left Geneva, it had become a fixed family ritual that, no matter where we were or how limited our financial resources, we would always get together as a family and with friends for a week’s skiing, usually during February. This year we had one of our best ever weeks in one of our favourite resorts, Val Thorens. The weather was wonderful, the snow was perfect, and I was more relaxed than I had been for the last ten years.

  I also had time to make two further trips to Kosovo, and had one final ‘wallpaper of State’ function to fulfil. On 7 February, the international ‘graveyard’ circus descended on Amman for the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan. This turned out to be the very acme of ‘working funerals’. To start with the whole international community were closeted for several hours in one of King Hussein’s palaces. Although Prince Charles was given a small suite, very few of the other Heads of State or Government seemed to have been accorded the same luxury, and I found little groups of Kings, Prime Ministers and Presidents huddled in corners and having urgent conversations sitting on the stairs. While Blair was being wheeled around a series of bilaterals, I took a wander round and counted, on the ground floor alone, the Queen of the Netherlands, the Kings of Norway, Sweden and Spain, the Secretary General of the UN, a very ill-looking Yasser Arafat, a very touchy-feely President Clinton, a very sunburned ex-President George H.W. Bush, a very sozzled-looking President Yeltsin, the German Chancellor, the French President and more Prime Ministers than you could shake a stick at. After a while we were all ushered outside and up the hill to the Palace where King Hussein’s coffin was lying in state. Then, pushing and shoving as only world leaders can, we filed off to a small square where a Jordanian army Corporal, obviously trained in the British tradition, bawled at the assembled multitude in a voice that would have been the envy of my Royal Marines drill sergeant, Bert Shoesmith:

  RIGHT YOU LOT. LINE UP FOR THE GRAVESIDE. ALL HEADS OF STATE TO THE FRONT!

  The Heads of State meekly obeyed and filed forward, leaving the rest of us in a most terrible crush under the boiling sun. Unfortunately, a small group of Gulf Arab Heads of State, being of diminutive stature, got caught in the general mêlée, and I was quite concerned that harm might befall them in the crush.
So, placing my arms on a wall in front of me, I pushed back against a collection of Japanese notables who obviously believed that, when it came to pushing, the Tokyo rush-hour had made them world champions, and they were going to prove it. I made an arch with my arms, under which passed sundry gorgeously attired Bedou royalty on their way to the grave of their Arab neighbour.

  Six weeks after King Hussein’s funeral, the Kosovo War started with US air raids on Belgrade. It did not go well. As many of us had suspected, the US air raids did little to damage the Serb forces but a lot to unite the Serbs behind Milošević, who continued the expulsion of the Kosovars with renewed vigour, this time blaming the international air strikes. Inevitably, bombing from fifteen thousand feet led to mistakes and the loss of innocent lives among both the Kosovars and the Serbs. The Allies were losing public support, and the cohesion of NATO was coming under great strain. To make matters worse, the Government seemed to believe that bombing could create what they called a ‘permissive environment’ in which ground troops would be able to occupy Kosovo without having to fight. Robin Cook went so far as to say that ground troops would never be used ‘in a hostile environment’, and other ministers echoed the same line. I spoke to Blair, saying that this was folly. Even if they did not feel that they could send ground troops into action, they should not say so: you do not tell your enemy what you are not going to do. And anyway, in my view, NATO could not win unless Milošević was convinced that the alternative to a peace on the international community’s terms was an invasion that we had the will and the means to push through, if needed.

  Blair over time clearly came to the same view, as the Government’s policy started to subtly change. But the Clinton Administration was still strongly opposed to committing US ground forces. Just before Blair went off to see President Clinton in Washington, I set off on another trip to the region with one of my close advisers, Julian Astle. We went first to Kukëš on the Albanian/Kosovo border, not far from where I had been on my first visit a year previously. Here, amid the rain and the mud, we saw thousands of wretched Kosovar refugees flooding over the border as Milošević’s Operation Horseshoe increased in violence and intensity. Then we went to Macedonia to visit the NATO commander, General Mike Jackson, who was gathering a formidable force on the Kosovo border. Over a good deal of whisky (a favourite Jackson accompaniment to late-night talks), it became clear that NATO’s commander had no idea what his political masters wanted of him. He had heard the Government say that troops would only be used in a ‘permissive environment’. But, being an intelligent General, he was also looking at alternatives if it came to a forced invasion. And here all the options were difficult to the point of being almost impossible. Mike Jackson told me, with concern, that apparently some, especially on the US side, were even thinking that the best way into Kosovo was to launch an invasion from Hungary, crossing the plains of Serbia and entering Kosovo ‘through the back door’. This would have been the height of folly. It was going to be difficult enough pushing the Serb Army out of Kosovo, which, though it may have been a religious centre, was now no longer regarded by most Serbs as part of their real homeland. But a full-scale invasion of Serbia proper would be resisted inch by inch by the whole Serb population – not to mention also probably starting a World War at the same time.

  I flew back to London very worried indeed that we were on the brink of defeat in Kosovo, or something much worse if some of the military follies being considered were not brought under control by political leaders. I was also very concerned that, if Milošević could just hang on for another six weeks or so, the internal cohesion of NATO would break up and the will to do anything at all would vanish. My report to Blair concluded that NATO had to decide soon that it would be prepared to use ground troops in a hostile environment, or it would lose; that the US had to get involved; and that someone (preferably Blair) had to brief General Jackson very soon on what precisely was required of him, as at present he had no clear instructions worthy of the name.

  On the day after I got back, I received a call from Jonathan Powell who was in Washington with Blair. He asked for my conclusions from the visit and I told him. He replied that Blair was about to go and see Clinton. Could I please fax my report through immediately, so that he could read it before the meeting? I did so.

  It was, I believe, at this meeting that Blair finally persuaded Clinton, against the counsel of his closest advisers, that he should be prepared to risk putting US troops in harm’s way and start preparing for an opposed invasion if necessary. This was an extraordinary achievement on Blair’s part. If he had failed to persuade Clinton, then I have little doubt that Milošević would have won in Kosovo, and NATO would have lost – with incalculable consequences for the region and for the credibility of NATO in the future. Tony Blair is to be credited with playing the greatest role in ensuring that this did not happen.

  Someone once said that when history repeats itself it is either as tragedy or as farce. In my view one of the chief reasons for Tony Blair’s miscalculations over the Iraq War arose from hubris in the wake of Kosovo, which led him to believe that he could have as much influence over President Bush junior on Iraq, as he had over President Clinton on Kosovo.

  On 3 June, finally convinced that NATO was serious about an invasion if it proved necessary, and after the Russians had made it clear that they would not support Belgrade in the case of an invasion, Milošević threw in the towel and agreed to the international community’s terms for peace. These included the total withdrawal of all Serb forces from Kosovo. On 12 June Mike Jackson led his NATO army across the mountain passes from Macedonia, and a few days later I flew to visit him in Pristina for my last visit to Kosovo, now peaceful and under the protection of NATO, and another punishing late-night whisky session with the General.

  A few days later, returning from a conference in Paris, I was rung by the outgoing High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Carlos Westendorp, asking me to put my name forward to be his successor. This was the first of several calls from senior international officials in Bosnia and elsewhere asking me to do the job. I told them all the same thing. I already had a job as MP for Yeovil and I did not believe in starting one job before I had finished the previous one. After I had stood down as an MP, perhaps. But until then, my answer was no.

  Gordon Brown also asked me to head a Government-backed enquiry into cigarette-smuggling, which was costing the Treasury millions in lost taxes. I gave him the same answer.

  On 9 August, the Liberal Democrats elected Charles Kennedy as my successor.

  My diary for that day concludes:

  I left the [Charles Kennedy] celebrations quietly and walked back to the House feeling just a tinge of sadness that I am no longer a leader of one of the great British political parties. But this was more than offset by the feeling of having cast off a very heavy burden.

  It has been a day of showers and rain, but the evening light has a wonderful luminescence. Some purplish clouds over County Hall and white cumulo-nimbus, like great confections of cream, in the far distance. The air is rain-washed, the Thames is blue and buffeted by evening winds, and I feel very contented.

  * In the event Labour won 418 seats and the Lib Dems 46. If we had combined in a coalition government, this would have increased the Government’s majority over all other parties from 179 to 269, leaving only a total of 195 MPs from the Tories and minority parties sitting on the opposition benches. If this had happened, it would, incidentally, have been impossible to accommodate all the Government MPs on the Government side of the House, probably necessitating a redesign of, or at least a reallocation of seats in, the Commons Chamber.

  † All three party leaders are given full-time Special Branch protection during a general election, and those involved are outstandingly professional. But, as soon as the result is known, protection for the defeated leaders is withdrawn more or less instantaneously, leaving the team with the new Prime Minster in place for as long as he or she is in post.

  * Pad
dy Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries, vol. 1, 1988–1997 (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 559.

  * Paddy Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries, vol. 2, 1997–1999 (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 104.

  * Ibid., p. 169.

  † Ibid., p. 159.

  * This villa, set in splendid grounds, was given to Britain by Tito after the Second World War in recognition of the help given by the United Kingdom, Fitzroy Maclean and SOE during his guerrilla campaign against the German and Italian occupying forces in Yugoslavia.

  * Paddy Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries, vol. 2, 1997–1999 (London: Allen Lane, 2001), p. 311.

  * These words, used by Robin Cook (now sadly dead), are taken from my diary for that day. They were included in the first draft of volume two of my published diaries, but were then omitted at Cook’s request and replaced, with his agreement, by a brief statement that he rang me and was depressed about the outcome.

  CHAPTER 15

  Bosnia and Herzegovina

  AFTER HANDING OVER the leadership of the Lib Dems I was hit by severe withdrawal symptoms and took it out on my back garden. We bought a strip of adjoining land from our neighbours, which more or less doubled the size of the small garden behind our cottage. In this I created a new vegetable plot, complete with compost heap, greenhouse, shed, fruit cage and a small orchard. I then redesigned our old garden, laying a herring-bone brick path and building over it a wooden pergola, which is now covered with honeysuckle, wisteria and roses. Next, I rearranged Jane’s flower garden and laid a paved hard standing, over which I built a vine covered lean-to, in whose shade I am writing this. So deep was my boredom that I even threatened to learn to cook – until Jane put her foot down and said she would leave me if I didn’t get out of her kitchen. I also, with more self-discipline than I knew I possessed, restrained myself when I found my fingers itching to get back into the action and tried to be as good an ex-Leader for Charles Kennedy as David Steel had been for me.