A Fortunate Life (44 page)

The following morning I briefed my close advisers, who were, without exception, supportive. It was in the course of this briefing that
Andrew Phillips told us that a few days previously the safe in his office (where he had put the envelope containing the notes of my conversation with him about my affair with Tricia) had been broken into, and the notes had been taken. What this meant was that the
News of the
World
was using stolen private documents as the basis for its story, something that was plainly illegal. We agreed that, on this basis, it was worth trying for an injunction to prevent the
News of the World
and other newspapers who might follow its lead from publishing, or at the very least buy us a little time to make our dispositions. Andrew put the relevant papers together and, that afternoon, obtained an
ex parte
injunction in very short order.

Meanwhile my brother Mark, who is himself a solicitor in Bristol, collected Tricia, who was living alone and had no one to help her, and brought her to London, so she could get some advice from Andrew Phillips and we could provide her with the support she needed. After this I returned to Yeovil and went through the excruciatingly painful process of telling first Jane, and then my Constituency officers what had happened and discussing with them what action we should take next.

Over the next few days rumour started to spread like wildfire around Westminster, and articles hinting at ‘a senior politician in a sex scandal’ started to appear in the newspapers. The
Independent
published just such a blazing headline, juxtaposing it with a separate report and full page photo of me at a minor meeting they would never normally have given two column inches to. Moreover, it was clear that, although the injunction would stop English newspapers publishing, it would have no effect on Scottish or European ones, and the moment one of them ran the story, the English Press would be free to follow suit.

On 4 February (actually in the middle of a private reverie during a pre-election dinner with the BBC) I took the decision that I was not going to wait for the papers to break the story; I was going to grab the initiative and break it myself. I phoned Jane that night to tell her. She agreed it was the right course of action and said she would come up to London the following day to be with me. The following morning I called in my key advisers and informed them what I was going to do and, at a packed and highly charged press conference at noon, made a clean breast of it all.

The following couple of days were terrible in the Press, with the
Sun
coming up with the headline, ‘Paddy Pantsdown’, which is still sometimes shouted at me from a distance by drunks or young men wanting
a bit of fun. Even the
Guardian
went to town, with a lead story spread over ninety percent of the front page and the whole of pages two and three, plus the main leader and another three pages with articles on the subject. Some of my political enemies enjoyed this greatly, especially because, although I have never either commented on or criticised anyone on matters of private morality, I did have a habit (chiefly springing from nervousness) of sounding a bit self-righteous and even priggish in the House. Indeed, the current joke about me was that the message on my answering machine was ‘Hello. This is Paddy Ashdown. Please leave your message after the high moral tone’. So this fall from grace caused a good deal of quiet satisfaction for some. But the Lib Dem MPs in the House of Commons, and especially my front-bench colleagues were outstanding, as was John Major, who wrote me a private letter expressing his sympathy and support.

And the British public at large seemed to be extraordinarily forgiving, too – my opinion poll ratings actually went up as a result! I was in no doubt, though, that this did not mean that they approved of what I had done, only of the way it had been handled. So often in these matters it is the public lying that does the most damage.

But nothing could lessen the shame I felt, especially at bringing such pain to Jane, my family and, indeed, to Tricia, quite apart from letting down so many in the Party who were preparing for a vital election. Indeed, the damage from my actions spread even wider, for the Press were determined to try to find other scandals to uncover, and for months up to and including the Election, there was barely a female friend who was not approached and accused of having an affair with me, and barely a day without some rumour or other being relayed to me. Jane, meanwhile, received a string of most unpleasant letters and phone calls which gave further ‘details’ of my supposed indiscretions, while in pubs and phone boxes in my Constituency anonymous flyers were circulated purporting to be a personal message from someone claiming to be my ‘love child’, complete with a picture, saying that I had abandoned her. All this made life for my family even more difficult, and seriously undermined my self-confidence too. That, it appears, was precisely what was supposed to happen – as we discovered after the Election, when we learned
*
that some Tories had imported a group of US activists called ‘The Nerds’, whose job was to manufacture
and spread malign rumours and make unfounded personal accusations against senior opposition MPs to undermine their effectiveness. Perhaps this was done without official sanction from the top of the Conservative Party. But perhaps not. After the election Kelvin Mackenzie, then editor of the
Sun
, revealed that at least one Cabinet-level Tory Minister had approached him seeking to retail scurrilous and untrue allegations against a number of senior opposition MPs.

None of this, of course, made for an easy general election campaign – though it had its moments. John Cleese helped us a lot during the campaign with appearances, advice and some very useful speech suggestions. Jokes (which I am not good at) are as valuable as gold to politicians, and they are always on the look-out for good ones – especially one-liners which can defuse a tricky moment. On one occasion, at a crucial point in the campaign, the Tories announced that David Owen was going to vote for them. I knew that the first thing I was going to have to do on the news that night was to give my reaction to Owen’s defection. Lost as to how to respond, I rang John, who gave me, seemingly without a moment’s thought, the perfect response. Sure enough, the first question I was asked that evening was ‘Mr Ashdown, what is your reaction to the fact that Dr Owen has announced that he will be voting Tory at the Election?’ To which I responded, with appropriate concern on my face, ‘Well it’s only fair. It
is
their turn.’

Des Wilson’s brilliant campaign was later acknowledged to be, by a clear margin, the best of the general election. All the same, we did make one major tactical error, which was more my fault than Des’s. We had both agreed beforehand that the aim of the campaign would be to make a hung parliament, and our role in it, the key issue of the last week of the campaign. In this Des succeeded brilliantly. By the last weekend, all the polls were pointing to a hung parliament, and I was on every news broadcast being asked what my price for a coalition would be. I tried to pretend that I could go into a coalition with either Party, but everyone knew that, after thirteen years of an increasingly unpopular Tory Government, I could never in reality have helped them in through the back door of Downing Street if the public had kicked them out through the front.

However, what neither Des nor I had spotted was that, as the campaign wore on, the public were getting increasingly concerned about the prospect of Neil Kinnock moving into Downing Street. Meanwhile
in my weekend interviews before polling day I compounded the error by sounding far too strident and cocky in my demands for proportional representation – I made it look as though I was more interested in what was good for the Lib Dems than in what was good for the country.

John Major caught the public mood much better when, on the Monday before the election, he pulled out his famous soap box and recast himself as the underdog, a decent man fighting against the odds and against a conspiracy between Kinnock and me. And then, at the infamous Sheffield Rally, Neil let his guard slip and indulged in a most unwise bout of loud-mouthed triumphalism, so confirming all the public’s fears about him. I once again felt the votes move massively away from us in the last days of the campaign.

On polling day, 9 April 1992, John Major, against the odds and all predictions, returned to Downing Street with a majority of 65, surprising the nation and, I think, himself as well. We had privately hoped to end up with 30 MPs, but we won only 20 seats, one more than when I was elected. Still, at least we had survived, which was more than almost anyone had predicted after the horrors of the first two years of the Party’s existence.

I
T IS 2 AUGUST 1992
, the Election is behind us and I am on my way to Sarajevo. Far below us the Adriatic shines with a deep ultramarine blue never seen in northern waters. Here the grain of Dalmatia runs parallel to the coast, leaving a necklace of islands and submerged inlets strung along the shore, where the great mountain ridges of the Dinaric Alps vanish under the Adriatic. After an hour’s flying we pass over the ancient town of Split, its red roofs a splash of colour against the slate grey of the hills which encircle it. This was the birthplace of the Emperor Diocletian, who drew, only two hundred miles to the east of us, the line that divided the Eastern from the Western Empire, around which blood and turmoil have swirled for two millennia and do so still today.

Suddenly the aircraft banks and gently dips, as we swing away from the coast towards the east and begin the long, slow incline downwards towards a distant rim of mountains, etched in a darker blue against an azure sky. ‘Now it gets more tricky,’ explains the pilot, sitting just in front of me. ‘Sometimes they fire at us. It happens rarely. But it does happen, and it can be a bit hairy at times.’ I notice that the RAF Special Forces team flying this
Hercules
, with its thirty tons of aid, suddenly put aside the relaxed atmosphere of our journey so far and begin preparing the aircraft for our approach.

We are now flying across north–south ridges, watered by lively streams and sprinkled with small alpine hamlets. It appears idyllic – until I look closer and see that the land is abandoned: very few houses have roofs, and many are little more than blackened shells.

Ahead, the rim of mountains starts growing into a row of formidable 6,000-ft peaks, at the base of which I can now dimly see a dark grey smudge spread like a stain across a broad open valley between the peaks. As I watch, this resolves itself into the outlines of a great city with a blanket of smoke hanging in the still air above it, fed by several columns rising up from the buildings below.

Now I can see the airport, perhaps ten miles ahead of us. As we cross the final ridge, the pilot tells me that if I look down I will see a Serb radar-controlled anti-aircraft battery tracking us in – and, sure enough, there it is, swinging gracefully with us as we pass overhead. The aircraft sensors pick up the hostile radar, and suddenly there are missile alarms screaming in our ears. The pilot flicks a switch to turn them off and then, it seems almost at the same time, the ground tips wildly up towards us, as the aircraft’s nose dips down at a suicidal angle, pointing straight at the threshold of the runway fifteen hundred feet below. The pilot has forewarned me that, because of the danger of ground fire, we will be doing a ‘Khe Sanh’ landing (as used by planes resupplying US forces besieged there during the Vietnam war), which means a very fast descent from fifteen hundred feet. But this in no way diminishes my concern that the ground is now rushing towards me on a sharp collision course, while just behind my head thirty tons of stores are straining against their lashings to break free and obey the law of gravity. The copilot is now counting, ‘Twelve hundred, a thousand, eight hundred, seven hundred …’ When he announces four hundred feet the captain lowers the flaps; again the ground tips crazily, this time back up into the right position, and G forces push my legs into the aircraft floor so hard that my knees are forced to bend involuntarily. Then, with little more than a whisper and as gently as thistledown, we are on the ground and taxiing towards the end of the runway, where I can see a ruined tank sunk at a crazy angle in a ditch, its gun pointing aimlessly at the sky.

‘Welcome to Sarajevo,’ the captain says.

Looking around, I see a collection of wrecked and burnt-out airport buildings, some sand-bagged foxholes, a terrace of ruined tenements pockmarked by bullet and artillery fire, and a large, cheery man wearing a flak jacket, a crazy sunhat and the most enormous white beard I have seen outside a Santa Claus grotto at Christmas.

‘Hi. I’m Larry Hollingworth,’ he says and sticks out a great square, work-calloused hand to greet me.

Larry, the head of the UNHCR (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) operation in Sarajevo, would become a good friend and wise counsellor on everything to do with Bosnia. He would also become famous, in this region and in the world of humanitarian assistance, as the man whose personal courage and dogged determination
kept the great city of Sarajevo alive during its terrible three-year siege and, in so doing, undoubtedly saved many thousands from starvation.

Later that afternoon I went into Sarajevo and called on the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegović, at whose huge funeral in the city I would speak more than a decade later, describing him as ‘the father of his nation’. We had a long conversation on the agony of Sarajevo and the tragedies of Bosnia, as a noisy Serb mortar and artillery barrage fell into the streets outside the shattered windows of his Presidency.

Later, when the bombardment had stopped, I walked briefly around the centre of the city, carefully taking Larry’s advice on which street junctions to run across, so as not to give the snipers in the hills surrounding the city too easy a target. I was shocked at the tired, frightened, grey faces of my fellow Europeans, for whom death was now an everyday accompaniment to the daily business of collecting water and rummaging for food in order to stay alive. Afterwards, at the local hospital, I stood at the bedside of a young boy of ten whose stomach had been ripped open by shrapnel, and wept as he died before my eyes.

Our final visit during that day was to a local park, now turned into a makeshift cemetery, where they were already excavating the graves for people not yet dead, but who would be among the inevitable harvest of those the snipers would cut down in the coming winter, when the ground would be too frozen for digging.

That night I spent in a small underground bunker Larry and his team had dug on Sarajevo airport. A particularly heavy bombardment made it difficult for either of us to sleep, so we sat outside on the sandbags, drinking our way slowly through the best part of a bottle of whisky I had brought with me. We talked about this senseless horror, and the culpability of those who had the power to stop it but didn’t, while watching the shooting stars above and their mirror-image of tracer arcing around us, much as one might an especially noisy firework show.

And so it was that in 1992 the threads of my life first became intertwined with the fate and future of the little country of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its extraordinary people.

It began, as have all the most important events of my life, completely by accident. One day in mid-July, two months after the general election, I was walking back from a television interview (on the shelling of Sarajevo, as it happens) with my friend and close adviser Alan Leaman,
bemoaning the fact that politics was always so dull after an election; the Government were entitled to their honeymoon period, and the Opposition could only sit tight, watch and wait for them to start making mistakes again. Alan, quite casually and I think not really meaning it, said, ‘You know a bit about wars, Paddy. If you are so bored, why don’t you go out and have a look at the one that has just started in Yugoslavia. You’ve always said that your style of politics is to get out of the House of Commons and see what is happening on the ground for yourself. Well, Sarajevo is where it’s happening – why not go there?’

And so, two weeks later, I was touring refugee camps in Croatia,
*
experiencing for the first time my uncontrollable Balkan affliction of unbidden tears as desperate people told me of their plight and the horrors they had suffered, while witnessing something that I had never dreamt we would see again on European soil, the use of railway wagons as instruments of ‘ethnic cleansing’. That evening, in a bar in Zagreb where I was having a drink with the local head of UNHCR, Tony Land, I managed to persuade the Special Forces RAF Squadron flying aid into Sarajevo for the UN to take me with them – largely, I think, because I remembered some of the names of the Special Forces guys who used to fly me in my SBS days.

At this point I must backtrack briefly for the benefit of those too young to have followed the Balkan crisis of the 1990s, or whose memory of events has become blurred.

The trouble had started in 1991, when Tito’s Yugoslavia began its violent disintegration. The Slovenians were the first to go, managing their exit largely peacefully. But, as Croatia moved to follow Slovenia, conflict broke out between Belgrade and Zagreb, with Yugoslav jets bombing the Croatian capital and severe fighting between the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Croatian forces, including the bombardment of Dubrovnik. Under pressure from Germany – which had its own
reasons for favouring Croatia’s independence – Britain
*
and other European nations recognised Croatia. This lit the fuse, and the Muslim majority in Bosnia and Herzegovina immediately moved to follow their Croatian neighbours, with their President, Alija Izetbegović, calling for a referendum. In response to this the Bosnian Serbs, under the leadership of Radovan Karadžić, started to mobilise in the hills.

The flashpoint in Bosnia came on 5 April 1992, when a sniper in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo shot dead a Muslim woman, Suada Dilberović, who was on a peace march. This was followed by further slaughter when Serb gunmen shot a number of Sarajevo citizens demonstrating in a park opposite the Bosnian Presidency building. These events, and others, provided the trigger for all-out war between the three communities – Bosniak Muslim (known nowadays as ‘Bosniak’), Croat and Serb – which quickly spread to all corners of Bosnia. By June, Sarajevo was under siege by Serbian forces, the UN airlift (which would keep the city alive for almost four years) had started, and Larry Hollingworth had been sent there to organise the distribution of the aid it delivered. On 30 June 1992, following a UN Security Council Resolution, a battalion of Canadian troops wearing the UN’s blue berets took over Sarajevo airport to facilitate the delivery of aid to the city and other parts of Bosnia. At the end of June, about a month before I flew in to the city, the Canadian UN forces left Sarajevo, and their role was taken over by French troops.