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.