Statement by Paddy Ashdown on Richard Holme

6 May 2008

Richard Holme 27 May 1936 - 4 May 2008

On 4 November 1997, Richard Holme was one of the 5 strong Liberal Democrat team on the Lib Dem / Labour Joint Cabinet Committee, when Prime Minister Blair concluded the meeting with an announcement that he was seeing Jane Fonda next. We were all duly impressed, which was no doubt the intention. And sure enough, as we filed out of the Cabinet Room, there she was sitting outside, looking very Jane Fonda-ish with long hair a rather daring skirt and a very long pair of boots.  I am not sure that the word “ogle” is one you could apply to Bob Maclennan. Ming Campbell and Alan Beith, but we were certainly transfixed and even more so when Richard walked over to her to say hello and she immediately recognised him from pool side parties in their anti-Viet Nam war days, in 1960s California.

There are few of use whose lives are so broad that they can encompass the Cabinet Room at N0 10 and the pool sides of 1960s Hollywood. But that of Richard Holme, who died on Sunday night, was one of them. I do not believe there have been many British liberals, elected or unelected have enjoyed a wider range of respect, had a more varied life, or achieved a greater influence, not just on the course of liberalism, but also on the course of government and politics in Britain, than Richard Holme. And there are probably none, beyond a tiny handful, whose range of contacts and achievements in Britain and abroad, have been more extensive.

Like many of us, he was inspired by Jo Grimond, joining the Liberal Party in 1959 and swiftly becoming one of its most influential thinkers and strategists. He was President of the Liberal Party in 1980-81, during the crucial years of the formation of the Liberal SDP Alliance and one of David Steels closest advisors during the period of his Leadership. He performed the same function for me when I was elected as the first Leader of the then floundering Liberal Democrats and was, I believe one of the two or three key reasons for the Party’s survival in these early years. He used to joke that I was Commando trained and so knew only one way to deal with an enemy; by fixing bayonets and charging at them. But being a Gurkha he knew the value of stealth. And he did. I cannot count the number of times when he saved me and the Party from some disaster which would have probably befallen us all if my instinct for immediate action had not been tempered with his wisdom and foresight.

His greatest gift to the Liberal Democrats, was probably his management of our 1997 General Election, when, on the basis of only seventeen percent of the vote and in the face of the Blair landslide, he delivered the Party’s greatest ever election advance, doubling our Westminster seats and establishing us in our present pivotal position in British Politics. Although he could, from time to time be quite abrupt and acknowledged that he found it difficult to tolerate fools easily, he was greatly loved by all he worked with in the Party and beyond it, for his clarity of vision and for his team building abilities. He was one of the key masterminds behind the partnership between the Liberal Democrats and New Labour before and immediately after the 1997 election, which not only helped turn a Tory defeat into a Tory rout, but also helped deliver (albeit in a manner more flawed than we would have wished), many of the constitutional changes for which Liberals had fought, but never achieved for over a hundred years, such as devolution for Scotland and Wales, the first breakthroughs introducing PR into British Elections, incorporating the European Bill of Rights into British Law and a Freedom of Information Law. If the partnership Government for which Tony Blair and I originally planned had come about, he would undoubtedly have been a Cabinet Minister in it and I am confident that his would have been a powerful voice arguing against many of the wrong turns which the Blair and Brown Governments have taken, especially on human rights and constitutional issues over the last eleven years.

A man of enormous energy, he also found time between politics and the public service to be a highly successful businessman, with a very wide range of engagement in commerce and industry, especially in the publishing sector.

He was given a CBE for public service in 1983, appointed a Life Peer in 1990 and a Privy Counsellor in 2000

His last speech in the House of Lords was given on May 1 2007, when he introduced the Report of the House Of Lords Constitutional Committee which he had so skilfully Chaired, recommending that Parliamentary approval should be required before a Government took the nation to war. The ravages of the cancer which eventually killed him were, at this time all too tragically evident. But his courage, eloquence and passion shone through, unconquered and undiminished.

Liberalism in Britain has lost a great champion, the Liberal Democrats, a great advocate and our public life, a great servant.

He is survived by his wife, Kay and their two sons and two daughters, to whom my heart goes out.