Paddy Ashdown’s ubiquitous presence on the media these days is not entirely an accident. I suspect, though, he wanted to spend more time talking about his new book, out tomorrow, than about Liberal Democrat plots and leadership crises. The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for Vercors is currently making its way to my Kindle and I’m looking forward to reading it, harrowing though it will be. Paddy knows how to tell a story with intelligence and emotional punch.

He has been talking to all sorts of media outlets, but I came across this quick interview with Arabian News which was more book related. He was asked what he got out of writing:

Oh, the joy of creation I suppose, if that’s not too pompous a word. I think you’d call me an author rather than a writer, a writer is probably a somewhat higher level – if someone called me a writer I’d be very, very flattered. Probably more flattered than being leader of the Liberal Democrats, or High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

He was asked why he chose to write about military matters:

Having been there. Having been in the Special Forces, having been involved in active service, I think I can bring a light to this, a detail to this which is not available to people who haven’t been through that experience. I have paddled up dark rivers in the middle of the night somewhere that I shouldn’t be, so I know what it’s like. I lived in a canoe for five or six days trying to remain hidden – that’s what we had to do.

There were some very interesting comments on the experience of modern politicians:

I think far too many politicians today come into politics in short pants straight out of school never having done anything else. Before I was elected I was a solider for 11 years, I was in the foreign service, I was a businessman, I was unemployed twice – I was actually elected to parliament from the unemployment register when I was given a temporary job as a youth worker. I’ve done a lot of things before I went into parliament. What I can say is that all of those things proved an accidental apprenticeship for the job that I then did. And I do think politics is diminished today by being far too professional, and having people telling us what to do who have never done a real job themselves.

There has been a slight bristling amongst Liberal Democrat activists in the last few days in response to Paddy’s comments on Marr that anything that wasn’t campaigning was damaging the party. What he obviously meant was in-fighting. However, it’s becoming a common thing for people to add a jokey “Don’t tell Paddy” as an aside when they’re talking about cooking the dinner or dead-heading roses. I wonder if he’d make an exception for reading Cruel Victory, so long as we did so only in the hours of darkness….

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