A Fortunate Life
Paddy Ashdown
Having read it
★★★★☆
An intriguing and insightful autobiography by a man who has managed to achieve quite a lot, travel many, many miles and helped many, many people with his good works and realistic means and methods, even if they’ve been a little awkward and not always suitable or correct, as he himself notes; his wife and their family (and the Ashdowns) have clearly been a solid foundation for him and his life’s efforts and enjoyments, despite the mistakes he made and honestly acknowledges in the book and, his political blood, sweat and tears shine through to show a man of strong morales, decent convictions and a bit of sheer doggedness when necessary; his High Commissioner work in and around Bosnia in the late 1990s (after the Balkan conflicts) and early 2000s also show dedication, collaboration and humanity that today’s, certainly UK, system(s) need a bit more of for the good of decent and fair progress for all . . . like his early 1997-onwards-and-a-bit efforts with Blair to genuinely collaborate as political parties and take progressive opportunities like bringing in proportional representation, but ultimately lost around the time.
A good passage
I learned an important lesson over these incidents.
The dangers of putting your conscience and judgement before your popularity are often far less than we politicians realise. The loss of votes in the short term is often compensated for in the long term by the gain in respect. Many voters want their MP to do what is right and often respect those who do, even while disagreeing with them. The scope for a bit of courage in politics is far greater than we think it is, even in this age of spin and the dark arts of ‘triangulation’.
A second good passage
After the 1992 election I had decided I needed to get out of the fug of Westminster and start refreshing my knowledge of the way ordinary people across Britain were living their lives. To be honest, it was something of a relief, for I never much liked Westminster, and the feeling was, I think, mutual. Some MPs take the view that politics is a purely Westminster affair. For me politics is what happens in people’s lives, and Westminster was just the place where I had to work.
In 1983, when I was elected, I discovered that the things I had done in my previous ‘real jobs’, from soldier, to ‘diplomat’, to businessman, to youth worker – even to being unemployed – had greatly helped me with the job I now had to do in Parliament. In-deed, though my trajectory through these jobs had been entirely accidental, they all combined to form a very useful apprenticeship to being an MP. But, after ten years in Parliament, I felt jaded and increasingly caught up in the Westminster game. I needed to refresh the reservoir of my enthusiasm and personal experience, and [writing] Beyond Westminster was the way I hoped to do this.I spent much of the early months of 1993 in a series of visits, living and working with people across the country. The format we hit on was for me to work for maybe two or three days with individuals in their workplace, spending the evenings with them and their families. The Press were not invited and only informed of my visits afterwards. My first visit was in January, to Britain’s deepest coalmine at Monktonhall in Scotland, where I worked a shift with the miners. Other visits included two days fishing with Cornish trawlermen in the Irish Sea; working with a businessman in Omagh, Northern Ireland; spending Ramadan with a Muslim family in Peckham and living with a black family in Moss Side, Manchester, which at the time was so under the control of drug gangs that it had become practically a no-go area for police. It was during my Moss Side visit that Jane got an early-morning phone call from Manchester police saying that they had just carried out a drugs raid, in the course of which they had stopped someone observing from the sidelines who claimed to be me and, indeed, looked very like me. But they couldn’t believe it was me. ‘Can you tell me if it is your husband?’ the caller asked. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jane replied, ‘that’s him!’