TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/040692/0406001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

BRITAIN

Invitations to the Dance


As the new third force in politics, Liberal Democrats may end
up as partners to be wooed in national life

By JAMES WALSH -- Reported by William Mader/London


    At his 1961 Inauguration John Kennedy proclaimed that the
torch of leadership had passed to "a new generation of
Americans, born in this century." In 1992 Britain's torch is
passing decisively to a new class of Britons, brought up without
an elite schooling or the right accent. Britain has had leaders
of humble origins before, but next week's election is a
milestone. For the first time, none of the chief
standard-bearers are products of those ancient mills of correct
breeding, Oxford and Cambridge. Of the Cinderellas awaiting the
nation's hand, moreover, none looks likelier to dance all night
than a newcomer accustomed to combat boots.

    Paddy Ashdown, a former Royal Marines commando, is hoping
that his Liberal Democrats will emerge from the election
holding the balance of power in Parliament and a new lease on
life. That outlook is promising. The absence of Oxbridge polish
on the campaign's three stars coincides with a blurring of the
ideologies that have long divided Britain. The opposition
Labour Party of Neil Kinnock, the Welsh laborer's son, has
struggled to shed the albatross of radical socialism. Now the
ruling Conservatives of Prime Minister John Major, the school
dropout, are patching up the social safety nets scorned by
Margaret Thatcher's survival ism of the fittest. With much less
to choose between the two main parties, chances are good that
neither will end up with a House of Commons majority.

    In a hung Parliament, the Liberal Democrats, who call the
political center home, would be the object of intense wooing.
Ashdown, 51, is ready. A comparative unknown on the national
scene, he has been doggedly stumping the country pitching a
message: Labour is a spent force, the Tories are uncaring, and
"the realities of the ballot box" will make both parties "more
realistic." As Ashdown defines it, realism is a fairer share of
power for the movement that is heir to the great Liberal
reformers of the 19th and early 20th centuries -- William
Gladstone, Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George.

    The Liberals went into eclipse after the First World War,
thanks to the capture of working-class votes by the party of
trade unions. Labour's post-1945 welfare state was in turn
thumped in 1979 by Thatcherism, whose strong defense policy
discredited Labour's now defunct creed of unilateral nuclear
disarmament. Today recession-racked Britons are unsure where to
turn. They are listening more closely to the clipped, almost
military-style speeches of a man who spent his formative years
defending Malaya against communist guerrillas and newborn Kuwait
against Iraqi claims in the 1960s.

    Born in India into a British army family from Northern
Ireland, Ashdown acquired his generic Irishman's nickname at a
boarding school in England. When his father failed as a pig
farmer in retirement, Ashdown enlisted in the Royal Marines,
took officer training and satisfied his thirst for adventure by
joining the highly respected Special Boat Service commandos.
After a decade of frontline service, he spent two years learning
fluent Chinese and soaking up Chinese history -- prompting
suspicions that he engaged in intelligence. In 1971 he resigned
with the rank of captain, entered the foreign service and was
posted to the British U.N. mission in Geneva.

    But Ashdown grew restless with diplomatic life. According
to friends, guilt about social ills back home got the better of
him. In the military he had found many fellow Marines who were
virtually illiterate. As he puts it, "Some were tougher, some
stronger, some more intelligent, some more decent. Yet by
accident of birth I was commanding them and not they me." He and
his wife Jane settled in the Somerset town of Yeovil, from
which Ashdown was elected to Parliament as a Liberal in 1983.
After the 1987 collapse of the Liberal alliance with the Social
Democrats -- mainly centrist defectors from Labour -- the two
parties merged and chose Ashdown as leader.

    In Britain's winner-take-all electoral system, the Liberal
Democrats, whose public approval rating hovers around 16%, are
not likely to gain a great deal more than the 22 seats they now
have in the 650-seat House. If called to form a coalition
Cabinet, however, they are prepared to exact a price: political
autonomy for Scotland and Wales and a Parliament elected by
proportional representation, the latter promising to give
Ashdown's faithful greater clout. Since a proportional system
would rob the major parties of strength, neither Major nor
Kinnock favors it, though Labour has bowed to the idea of
autonomy for Wales and restive Scotland. If a hung Parliament
emerges, a Labour-Liberal Democrat match is the more likely
partnership.

    Strangely, Ashdown's personal appeal increased only after
a newspaper's February expose of his brief affair with a former
secretary five years ago. Unlike Bill Clinton's alleged amour in
the U.S., the Ashdown affair left voters sympathizing with the
party leader they had not known well before. Even so, whoever
comes up with a Commons majority after next week, the bold
leadership Britain knew during the 1980s stands to shade into
a more uncertain thing. Tories and Labour are groping for new
directions. Ashdown commands the middle of the road, but he may
get trampled under the stampede to join him.