A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown

Author:Paddy Ashdown [Paddy Ashdown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845136475
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 2010-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

And the start of our campaign in 1983 did very little to encourage me. Nick sent Jane and me alone to Buckland St Mary (at the time a Tory stronghold) at the western extremity of the Constituency. In a whole day’s canvassing we found no more than a tiny handful of supporters, and then, to top it all, at the first public meeting of the campaign in the village hall that evening, not a single person turned up. Dejected and cross, I rang Nick that evening complaining that it was a disaster and that no one had come out to help us. He calmed me down and got me back on the road the following day, saying that his plan was to leave our best areas to the last.

At first the Liberal–SDP Alliance did not do well. I remember being shocked by the discovery that Roy Jenkins (for whom I had, and retain, a very high regard) was so unpopular, especially in Labour areas. He was – most unfairly, in my view – seen by many, including potential supporters, as an upper-crust fat cat who had returned from Brussels (where he had been President of the Commission) and was completely out of touch with the realities of life in Britain. Our opinion poll ratings started to drift down dangerously. Halfway through the campaign, David Steel called a ‘summit’ at his house in Ettrick Bridge in Scotland and, in a move as deft as it was ruthless and necessary, sidelined Jenkins and took control of the national campaign. Our poll ratings began to recover immediately.

From this moment onwards our local campaign got better and better and more and more fun every day. Our daily and constant companion was Les Farris, then a relatively newly arrived activist, later a most effective regional agent for the Party in the south-west when I was Leader, and ever since one of our closest friends. He drove us everywhere in a long-wheelbase Land Rover lent by a friend, to which we became so attached on our dawn to dusk daily outings that, for some reason I cannot remember, we conferred on it a Party membership card under the name Trevor Dark Green. It was on this campaign that Les also invented a new political rule, which we called the Jack Russell Protocol. This asserted that everyone who owned a Jack Russell was a Liberal voter. And so it apparently turned out to be. For we tried the Jack Russell Protocol out on every owner of a Jack Russell we saw during the campaign (and there seem to be many in this part of Somerset), and it never failed us. On election day itself, we were driving down an especially bumpy and isolated country lane and came across a Jack-Russell-cross hunting in the hedgerow. I insisted that Les should stop so that I could search out the owner, who I found a few moments later and, in the presence of his half-Jack Russell/half-dachshund, I asked him how

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