When the young Paddy Ashdown surprised himself by the power of his own rhetoric

Last night I went to an enjoyable and nostalgic event hosted by Total Politics magazine, at which Paddy Ashdown was in conversation with Iain Dale about his autobiography A Fortunate Life (April, 2009).

Hearing him in ‘elder statesman’ mode reminded me of the earliest clip from an Ashdown speech in my collection -which may well have been the first time any of his speeches had ever appeared on television (see below).

It’s from the debate on cruise missiles at the Liberal Party Assembly in 1981, two years before he became an M.P.

If the then prospective parliamentary candidate for Yeovil possessed a suit, he certainly wasn’t wearing it that day, preferring to appear in a sweater and open necked shirt – though the podium unfortunately prevents us from seeing whether or not he was also wearing sandals.

This was Ashdown in post-military mode, barking out his lines to the troops at high speed and with a serious shortage of pauses. I’ve often used it as an example of how an inexperienced speaker can sometimes be surprised by the power of his own rhetoric. The audience (predictably) applauds after the third item in a three-part list, at which point he breaks off, looking vaguely surprised by what's just happened.



POSTSCRIPT: 7 YEARS LATER
Paddy subsequently changed his position on cruise missiles, for which he was rewarded with the nickname ‘Paddy Backdown’.

This continued to haunt him during the Ashdown v. Beith campaign for the leadership of the new party formed by the Liberal-SDP merger in 1988. According to his opponents, this change of heart was evidence of inconsistency and indecisiveness, therefore making him unsuitable for leadership.

The response from some of his supporters, which you won't be able to find in his autobiography, came in the form of a very neat contrast along the lines of:

"It’s a damn sight easier to knock sense into a charismatic person than it is to knock charisma into a sensible person."

A smear that never was

During the election of a new leader for the new party formed after the merger of the SDP and the Liberal Party in 1988, there was talk of a possible smear that could have gone either way.

Those of us on Paddy Ashdown’s campaign team got wind of the fact that supporters of his opponent, Alan Beith, had recruited a handwriting expert to analyse a sample of Paddy’s writing without revealing whose writing it was - in the hope that it might reveal some character flaw that might damage his chances of winning.

But the expert apparently disappointed them by saying that he/she had never before seen ‘leadership’ jumping so forcibly off the page - which meant that they had more reason to hide the news than to leak it to the media.

Needless to say, we thought this was hilarious, but it did raise the question of whether or not it would be to our advantage to let the media know that the Beith camp had been cooking up a dirty trick that had rebounded on them by showing that our candidate’s handwriting oozed ‘leadership’.

I’m pleased to say that our decision not to leak the story to the press was unanimous.

Two decades later, and in the light of recent smear stories, I find myself wondering whether we would have been quite so virtuous had the polls and projections not already been showing that Paddy was almost certain to win - a luxury not enjoyed by Gordon Brown's entourage.