Talking head

‘There’s no point in being a liberal if you’re just a furry little herbivore on the edges of British politics,’ declared Paddy Ashdown on Sunday on Private Passions (Radio 3). It was a revealing comment. The programme went out last weekend after the LibDem’s disastrous results in the local elections, but it would have been recorded much earlier. Ashdown was meant to be talking about his favourite music, and why he had chosen it, but he could not resist telling us what he thought of the Con-Lib Coalition. ‘This [being in government] is not going to deliver a dividend for the LibDems until a little before the next [general] election,’ he said. Might he not have avoided the topic, knowing that he was not yet sure what would happen on 3 May? But then, of course, he’s a politician, now a life peer, and talking is his profession, his leitmotif, his reason for being.

This Radio 3 conversation with musical interludes was peppered with the strangest of comments from Ashdown. Most striking, however, was the way that the presenter, Michael Berkeley (who composes music as well as knowing more about it than Ashdown ever will), was scarcely given an opportunity to say anything about the pieces Ashdown had chosen. Yet usually Berkeley shares his enthusiasm, his knowledge, with his guest of the week, taking us on a journey of deepening understanding and reflection.

Ashdown revealed that he first heard Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony at the age of 11 while ‘walking through my prep school’. Not his fault he was sent away to school but so pompous in the way he phrased that, confirming yet again the elitist bias of the Westminster brigade. He probably thought he was safe to say it on Radio 3, not realising that its listener base is changing, broadening.