Paddy Ashdown - Political Career

Political Career

While in the Marines, Ashdown had been a supporter of the Labour Party, but joined the Liberal Party in 1975. He had a comfortable life in Switzerland, where he lived with his wife Jane and their two children Simon and Katherine in a large house on the shores of Lake Geneva, enjoying plenty of time for sailing, skiing and climbing. Ashdown decided to enter politics due to living during the era of two general elections in one year and the Three-Day Week. He said that "most of my friends thought it was utterly bonkers" to leave the diplomatic service, but that he had "a sense of purpose".

In 1976 Ashdown was selected as the Liberal Party's prospective parliamentary candidate in his wife's home constituency of Yeovil in Somerset, and took a job with Normalair Garrett, then part of the Yeovil-based Westland Group. Yeovil's Liberal candidate had been placed second in February 1974 and third in the October 1974 general election, and Ashdown's objective was to "squeeze" the local Labour vote to enable him to defeat the Conservatives, who had held the seat since its creation in 1918. He subsequently worked for Tescan, and was unemployed for a time after that firm's closure in 1981, before becoming a youth worker with Dorset County Council's Youth Service, working on initiatives to help the young unemployed.