Paddy Ashdown new Sec Def?

[ORAC]

Breaking news on TV. To be confirmed.

If nothing else it reflects the Cameron/Portilloite wing of the party squeezing out the right wing of the Conservative party and replacing them with Lib Dems.

Long term this could lead to a split in the Conservative party.

[VinRouge]

Sec Def or SOS for Defence?

I think we all know we have big cuts afoot, I would prefer him to some of the scum we had on offer from Labour.

[vecvechookattack]

Paddy Ashdown is a good man.

He is Ex military.... A long time ago though

He passed his Royal Navy Entrance exam during which he enjoyed time with his teacher....

He lives in Somerset....

He is a bloody nice bloke....

He will have the Armed Forces best interests at heart....

He is very old though..... couldn't Nick Clegg have offered someone younger...????

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Before anyone gets overly carried away, former bootneck and militarily literate Paddy has never been found guilty of air-mindedness. I think it's also fair to say that he is only marginally more sea-minded.

[Willard Whyte]

He could never make his bloody mind up as an MP either.

All talk, no trousers; certainly since shedding the uniform.

[Lima Juliet]

Does that mean the end of the Nuclear Deterent - that was a Lib Dem proposed policy? :eek::eek::eek:

WW, you might be a little harsh on his character. He did pass "selection" and served with the SBS - that takes a lot of determination, conviction and courage.

[The B Word]

Have a read of this extract on Paddy's service - one bit doesn't read well for upper class "Wooperts"!


I also followed Ram into the SBS, the Special Boat Section (now Service). One of the first lessons on the training course was on survival.
A mountainous sergeant came into the lecture room, walked up to the front and put both his arms on the lectern.
“Right! Today you will learn survival. It’s not complicated,” he said, pulling two very ancient pieces of bread, curled up at the edges, out of one pocket of his parachute smock.
He then pulled a live frog out of the other, put it between the pieces of bread and ate it. “If you can do that,” he said, “you will survive. If you can’t, you won’t!”
It was the shortest and most effective lesson I have ever attended.
My training involved not just frog sandwiches but also, for reasons I could never understand, learning to run across the mud flats of Ports-mouth harbour in full diving kit and carrying swim fins (flippers) – about the most exhausting thing I have ever done.
When we finally got underwater, I found that our “dry” diving suits always leaked. We were diving through the early winter months for 90 minutes at a time. The only relief from the cold was to save up your pee until about an hour into the dive and then pee into your suit to warm yourself up for the last half-hour.
We learnt how to use not only the standard British Army weapons of the time but also the weapons commonly used by our enemies. I found myself proficient enough with most short-barrelled weapons, with the single exception of the pistol, with which I proved absolutely useless. It soon became clear to me that if I was armed with one of these, then by far the safest place to be was the target, for this I seemed incapable of hitting even at the closest range.
This applied most especially to the second world war Welrod silenced pistol then issued to SBS combat swimmers, a single-shot affair that took about 15 seconds to reload. If ever I had to depend on one of these, I concluded it would be easier to damage a potential enemy by throwing it at him than by trying to shoot him with it.
Towards the end of our course we were taught how to resist interrogation. Basically, interrogation is a battle of wills between the interrogator and the prisoner. The interrogator’s job is to induce in the prisoner a kind of conditional and temporary mental breakdown.
One interrogator told me that, if the situation had been real and he had enough time, he knew exactly how he could break me – make me sit for days and days in solitary confinement with absolutely nothing to do. He told me I was the kind of person who always had to be active and pushing against something, and that idleness, rather than pain, was my Achilles heel. It is not an inaccurate judgment.
One of the things I discovered in the SBS was that my colleagues divided pretty neatly into two: those who hated the claustrophobia and disorientation of diving but loved parachuting, and those who (like me) never minded the diving but hated the parachuting.
To be honest, parachuting scared me to death then and has scared me to death ever since. Although I qualified for my parachute wings and did more than 60 jumps with the SBS, I never managed to bring myself to believe that it is a rational thing to throw yourself out of an aircraft travelling at 120mph a thousand feet above the ground, on the basis that the pack on your back really contains a parachute and not just a collection of old socks somebody has absent-mindedly left there.
I got my radical political opinions from the SBS. I inherited from my father a deep dislike of the class system in Britain. I hated the large part this seemed to play in the services in general and especially, at the time, in the Royal Navy. In the SBS, people were valued and trusted according to their abilities and skills, not their origins.
I once saw this at work when a grizzled and much respected veteran of the SBS sat down for breakfast with a bowl of porridge next to a Guards officer, saying a cheery “Hullo”.
Receiving no response, he said it again and then, with increasing menace, a third and fourth time. The recipient of this cheery greeting, who was wearing a hat, said in a very drawly upper-crust voice: “Don’t y’know, old man, that in the Guards the tradition is that if we don’t want to be spoken to, we wear a hat.”
To which my friend growled: “In the Royal Marines the tradition is that if we are rude at breakfast we get to wear a plate of porridge,” and tipped the lot over his head. IN 1966 Denis Healey, then secretary of state for defence, ordered a defence review, which concluded that all British armed forces east of Suez, with the single exception of those in Hong Kong, should be withdrawn. He visited Singapore, where I was based, and we were tasked with putting on a demonstration for him involving divers exiting a submerged submarine and some SBS frogmen parachuting into the sea alongside him.

[Wycombe]

Liam Fox confirmed as SecDef

[Topsy Turvey]

Its not Paddy, according to News 24 it is Liam Fox!

[The B Word]

At least Liam Fox has some Service experience as a Civilian ARMY Medical Officer a few years back.

Does that mean that Fox hunting is still off of the Agenda??! :}

[The B Word]

A bit of "Googling" sees Paddy tipped for a post as "National Security Advisor" - a new post, maybe? At least he is CT aware.

[Squirrel 41]

Leon,

It wasn't LibDem policy. A "like for like" replacement of four V-Boats was ruled out, but essentially LibDem policy is put Trident in particular and UK nuclear weapons policy (hard to call it a "deterrent" if it doesn't deter anyone useful) into the forthcoming SDR. (Or as Tory policy an International Security and Defence Review, which is a much better idea.)

S41

[Lima Juliet]

S41

Interesting as both me, the old PM and the new PM were very recently of a different opinion:

GB: "But I don't favour Nick's [Clegg] proposal which would be unilaterally abandon our nuclear deterrent when we know that Iran and North Korea and other countries are trying to get theirs."

DC: "And are we really happy to say that we would give up our independent nuclear deterrent, when we don't know what's going to happen with Iran? We can't be certain of the future in China, we don't know exactly what our world will look like. I say we should always have the ultimate protection of our independent nuclear deterrent."

In a bit of a back-track the new Deputy PM started to talk about the "like for like" business in the same debate. However, I remain somewhat suspicious. Also, I would absolutely expect the Strategic Nuclear Deterent to be mentioned/considered in the Strategic Defence Review!!! I just hope that this intent is indeed true and not a thinly disguised move to swipe the deterent (and I for one believe it is one, having lived through a quarter century of the Cold War).

LJ

[Squirrel 41]

Leon,

The LibDem policy hasn't changed, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The problem is that GB and DC were both in favour of keeping Trident out of the SDR, which is a disastrous decision. It is an extremely expensive capability when viewed in capability terms - all of the supporting elements need to be included, as well as the through life costs; at a time of likely £7bn budget cuts, it's got to fight its corner against conventional capabilities. Personally, I don't think it makes the grade, but then I'm not running the review.

At least it's vale for Comrade Bob!

S41

[Willard Whyte]

WW, you might be a little harsh on his character. He did pass "selection" and served with the SBS - that takes a lot of determination, conviction and courage.

I'm not sure why I wrote 'either'. I don't doubt his pre-political abilities. Post-conversion I rank him as no better than the other Liberal wishy-washy thinkers - speaking as the son of a retired LD councillor. Terribly nice people without a clue how to actually do anything. Discuss? Yes. Do? No. Maybe that's changed over the last few days though. We'll see.