Paddy Ashdown was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 2006 New Year Honours and Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 2015 New Year Honours.
42 Facts About Paddy Ashdown
2.
In 2017, Paddy Ashdown was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honour by the French government.
3.
Paddy Ashdown had an interpretership qualification in Mandarin and was fluent in several other languages, including Malay, German, French and Bosnian.
4.
Paddy Ashdown was the eldest of seven children: four brothers and two sisters.
5.
Paddy Ashdown was born in New Delhi, British India, on 27 February 1941 to a family of soldiers and colonial administrators who spent their lives in India.
6.
Paddy Ashdown's father was a lapsed Catholic, and his mother a Protestant.
7.
Paddy Ashdown's mother was a nurse in the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps.
8.
Paddy Ashdown's father, John William Richard Durham Paddy Ashdown, was a British Indian Army officer who served in the 14th Punjab Regiment and the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, and in 1944 attained the rank of temporary lieutenant colonel.
9.
Paddy Ashdown was primarily brought up in Northern Ireland, where his father bought a farm in 1945 near Comber, County Down.
10.
Paddy Ashdown was educated first at a local primary school, then as a weekly boarder at Garth House Preparatory School in Bangor and from age 11 at Bedford School in England, where his accent earned him the nickname "Paddy".
11.
Paddy Ashdown served until 1972 and retired with the rank of captain.
12.
Paddy Ashdown then went to Hong Kong in 1967 to undertake a full-time interpreter's course in Chinese, and returned to the UK in 1970 when he was given command of a Royal Marine company in Belfast.
13.
Paddy Ashdown left the Royal Marines to join the Secret Intelligence Service.
14.
At the UN, Paddy Ashdown was responsible for relations with several UN organisations, involved in the negotiation of several international treaties, and some aspects of the Helsinki Accords in 1975.
15.
Paddy Ashdown had a comfortable life in Switzerland, where he lived with his wife Jane and their two children, Simon and Katherine, in a large house on the shores of Lake Geneva, enjoying plenty of time for sailing, skiing and climbing.
16.
Paddy Ashdown decided to enter politics after the UK had two general elections in one year and the Three-Day Week.
17.
Paddy Ashdown said that, "most of my friends thought it was utterly bonkers" to leave the diplomatic service, but that he had "a sense of purpose".
18.
In 1976 Paddy Ashdown was selected as the Liberal Party's prospective parliamentary candidate in his wife's home constituency of Yeovil in Somerset, and took a job with Normalair Garrett, then part of the Yeovil-based Westland Group.
19.
Yeovil's Liberal candidate had been placed second in the February 1974 and third in the October 1974 general elections; Paddy Ashdown's objective was to "squeeze" the local Labour vote to enable him to defeat the Conservatives, who had held the seat since its creation in 1918.
20.
Paddy Ashdown subsequently worked for Tescan, and was unemployed for a time after that firm's closure in 1981, before becoming a youth worker with Dorset County Council's Youth Service, working on initiatives to help the young unemployed.
21.
That position being an unpaid "volunteer" one, Paddy Ashdown was at the time classified as "long-term unemployed", having applied unsuccessfully for 150 jobs.
22.
Paddy Ashdown had gained momentum after his years of local campaigning.
23.
Paddy Ashdown opposed the privatisation of the Royal Ordnance Factories in 1984, criticised the Thatcher government in 1986 for allowing the United States to bomb Libya from UK bases, and campaigned against the loss of trade union rights by workers at GCHQ in 1987.
24.
Paddy Ashdown led the Liberal Democrats into two general elections, in 1992 and 1997, and three European Parliament elections, in 1989,1994 and 1999.
25.
Paddy Ashdown announced his intention to resign as Leader of the Liberal Democrats on 20 January 1999, departing on 9 August that year following 11 years in the role, and was succeeded by Charles Kennedy.
26.
Paddy Ashdown was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000 and after retiring from the Commons one month previously, he was created a Life Peer, the peerage being gazetted on 16 July 2001 as that of as Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, of Norton-sub-Hamdon in the County of Somerset.
27.
Paddy Ashdown was the subject of This Is Your Life in 2001, when he was surprised by Michael Aspel at BBC Television Centre.
28.
In retirement, Paddy Ashdown became a regular voice for the Liberal Democrats.
29.
Paddy Ashdown publicly supported military strikes in Syria in 2013 and said he was ashamed after Parliament voted against them.
30.
Paddy Ashdown said he would eat his hat if the exit poll was correct.
31.
In June 2007, the BBC reported that Paddy Ashdown had been offered and rejected the Cabinet post of Northern Ireland secretary by incoming Labour Party prime minister Gordon Brown.
32.
Paddy Ashdown succeeded Wolfgang Petritsch in the position created under the Dayton Agreement.
33.
Paddy Ashdown was sometimes denigrated as "the Viceroy of Bosnia" by critics of his work as High Representative.
34.
On 14 March 2002, Paddy Ashdown testified as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
35.
From this location, through his binoculars, Paddy Ashdown claimed to have seen Serbian forces shelling several villages.
36.
Paddy Ashdown later decided against taking the role after gleaning that Afghanistan preferred General Sir John McColl over him.
37.
Paddy Ashdown was a member of the Governing Council of Interpeace, an international peacebuilding organisation, and served as President of Chatham House.
38.
Paddy Ashdown later chaired the Liberal Democrats' 2015 general election team.
39.
In 2016, Paddy Ashdown founded More United alongside several other public figures in response to the result of the June referendum on British membership of the European Union.
40.
Paddy Ashdown was portrayed by Donald Sumpter in the 2015 Channel 4 television film Coalition.
41.
Paddy Ashdown was a member of the National Liberal Club.
42.
Paddy Ashdown died on 22 December 2018 at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, at the age of 77.