If only British politics had more people like Paddy Ashdown 

I didn’t agree with much that Paddy Ashdown had to say. But what a man! If we could all die knowing that we have given a tenth as much to our country as Ashdown, we should be very pleased indeed. This is from a review of his autobiography I did nine years ago for the Sunday Times.
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IT IS DOUBTFUL doubtful that when George Osborne’s autobiography, say, hits the bookstands it will reveal that he once slashed his arm open on a viciously sharp bamboo panji while camped in the jungle of Borneo fighting a covert guerilla war against the Indonesians. Still less, I reckon, the method of treatment for said injury, fashioned by an aboriginal tracker scout: “He went to a nearby ant heap . . . and picked out, one by one, about two dozen very large soldier ants which he put in a box. Then, squatting beside me, he proceeded to close the wound with one hand and place a soldier ant, with its mandibles open, one on each side of the wound . . . one by one the soldier ants closed their mandibles, sealing the wound almost painlessly.” Don’t you just love that “almost”?

This is, then, less a political autobiography than a real-life Dangerous Book for Boys, and all the better for it. In fact, the political stuff does not start until page 165 and disappears not long after; leading Britain’s third political party to its best electoral performance in 60 years is, for Ashdown, little more than an interesting footnote. This is more than anything else an adventure story. Fascinating and uplifting and genuinely, without irony, heroic, the sort of book you should read to your kids, just to let them know what can be done. And it will make your own life seem timid and beige.

Ashdown was born in Delhi, where his best friend was, we learn, a monkey, but was brought up in Northern Ireland, where he and his charismatic if occasionally tyrannical father enjoyed fishing in the loughs and, to raise cash, smuggled goods over the border with the south.