More than politics

Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff. Then there’s the extra-curricular life — the gliding accident, the false start as a trapeze artist at 17, chairmanship of the Benevolent Fund for Abandoned Zoo Animals, the notorious fling with the Foreign Secretary’s wife, the deep love of Shelley, the book on Indian Railways and the passion for rare cyclamen. Crikey, you think, let’s hope he at least makes it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But if this fellow could write, what a memoir! Yet the truth is, he’d have struggled to find a publisher.

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon will have had no such difficulty. There is a simple reason. He was for 11 years a fairly effective leader of Britain’s third political party. As such, a man is entitled to a peerage, and to an autobiography — in which, if he insists, he may throw in a section on the early and non-political parts of his life, too.

But these last are what makes this book. Paddy Ashdown’s erstwhile prominence in politics supplies the less thrilling or satisfying part, and occupies only half of it. It’s Ashdown the man, Ashdown the young rebel, Ashdown the 15-year-old fondler of his maths tutor’s breasts, Ashdown the soldier, the Chinese linguist and Ashdown the spy, that will grip any reader of this action-packed, pacey, lyrical and sweetly honest book — be they interested in politics or wholly unconcerned.

In fact those in search of political news and insight are the only readers likely to come away disappointed.