Word: ashdown
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...