Article for Yorkshire Post
By Paddy Ashdown 22 Oct 2007
Mark Twain once wrote of a notice in the wheelhouse of the Mississippi steam boats which said “Don’t speak to the Captain; don’t spit on the floor”. It’s a good motto for ex-Party Leaders and one I have tried to follow.
But the Lib Dems don’t have a Captain on the bridge at the moment. So here are some thoughts for those now campaigning to get there.
First I hope our new Captain will be Yorkshire MP, Nick Clegg. I have known him for more than ten years since Leon Brittan (check spelling), then the Tory Commissioner in the EU for whom he worked, described him as the brightest young talent he had ever known, complained that he had tried in vain to tempt Nick into the Tories and asked me to help him in the Lib Dems.
That kind of thing doesn’t work in the Lib Dems. And anyway Nick has made it entirely through his own formidable talents and on the way won the admiration of all he has met and taken some very courageous decisions; such as the one not to hold onto the safety of his seat in the EU Parliament while he won Sheffield Hallam when it would have been easier and safer (but less principled) to hold onto it until he was in Westminster. Courage and decisiveness are the essential quality for leadership and Nick has them, alongside a formidable array of the more usual political talents. They will serve him, the Lib Dems and the country well when, as I hope, he wins on XXX (insert date of announcement of the ballot) when the new Lib Dem Leader is announced.
But what kind of job is he stepping into ?
The toughest one in British politics.
The Leader of the “official” opposition (David Cameron) gets the salary of a Cabinet Minster, an official Government driver and a Government car. Nick will have none of these. He will be expected to match and outmatch both Cameron and Brown. But he will be paid as an ordinary MP. If he has an official car, he will depend on the Party or a benefactor for it. And if he is driven around on the exhausting schedule Party Leaders have to follow, then he will either do it himself or depend on one of his very limited (in comparison with Cameron and Brown) staff.
At Prime Minister’s Questions (which I found more frightening than anything I ever did on active service with the Royal Marines or the SBS), Cameron and Brown speak from the Despatch Box, which means they can have full folders of notes. He will have no such advantage. When he speaks he will do so to a House in which he will be outnumbered ten to one by hostile opposition MPs and he will do it from an ordinary place on the benches where anything but the skimpiest notes are impossible. They can speak from prepared texts. He has to depend on his wits.
So what can he expect? Shouting and barracking from 600 hostile MPs (check how many MPs in the House now) if he makes the tiniest error and having to fight for every column centimetre and broadcast second of press coverage from a media system (The Yorkshire Post honourably excepted) which would much prefer that the third Party didin’t exist so that they could concentrate on the “big two”.
So why would anyone want the job ?
Because, although leading the Lib Dems may be the toughest job in politics it is, for the stout hearted and the fleet of foot, also the best. It allows you to be unconventional; to lead opinion rather than follow it, to break the mould where you need to and, above all to be the voice for the greatest of all political philosophies and the only one genuinely in tune with our age; Liberalism (I know this because both Tories and Labour are trying desperately to pretend that this is what they are too).
So my advice to the next Leader of the Lib Dems is make very clear what you want to do before you get the job. It may be easier to win with careful words and carefully constructed compromises. But there is no point in winning this back breaking and sometimes heartbreaking job unless you know exactly what you want to do with it and have the mandate from the Party to do it. Nick seems to understood this well, as his call for the Party to “go outside its comfort zone” shows.
But being right does not necessarily mean winning. The next Leader of the Lib Dems also needs to recognise what kind of a game he is in. For the Leaders of the “big two”, politics is like a heavyweight boxing match. They slug it out and the last one left standing, wins. Leading the Lib Dems is much more like jujitsu. You rarely get to create the momentum of the moment. So you have to take the momentum set by the other two and turn it to your advantage. To do this, you need to be sharper, and more quick witted than them and take more risks, including the risk occasionally to be in the minority in Parliament and derided for it. That is what my great hero Jo Grimond did over Suez, I did over Bosnia and Charles Kennedy and Ming Campbell did over Iraq.
My last piece of advice for whoever wins on XXX is, don’t forget politics does not just exist at Westminster. Personally I hated the place. I preferred my politics out of Westminster, amongst the people of the country who we serve. If we are to re-build trust amongst ordinary people in our political system, then it is in their midst that we must increasingly do our politics, not the hothouse of that brawling pit, the Chamber of the House of Commons.