[10] After his father's business collapsed, Ashdown passed the naval scholarship examination to pay for his school fees,[11] but left before taking A-levels and joined the Royal Marines in 1959.

[3] He then went to Hong Kong in 1967 to undertake a full-time interpreter's course in Chinese,[11] and returned to the UK in 1970 when he was given command of a Royal Marine company in Belfast.

He 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.

[15] In 1976 Ashdown was selected as the Liberal Party's prospective parliamentary candidate in his wife's home constituency of Yeovil in Somerset,[13] and took a job with Normalair Garrett, then part of the Yeovil-based Westland Group.

Yeovil's Liberal candidate had been placed second in the February 1974[16] and third in the October 1974 general elections;[17] Ashdown's objective was to "squeeze" the local Labour vote to enable him to defeat the Conservatives,[13] who had held the seat since its creation in 1918.

[19] At the 1979 general election, which returned the Conservatives to power, Ashdown regained second place, establishing a clear lead of 9% over the Labour candidate.

[20] The Conservative majority of 11,382[20] was still large enough to be regarded as a safe seat when the sitting MP John Peyton stood down at the 1983 general election to be made a life peer.

[14] He 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.

[27] While the Liberal Democrats vote share decreased in the 1999 European Parliament election, the move from first-past-the-post to the D'Hondt method saw the party make a net gain of 8 seats.

[28] Between 1993 and 1997, he was a notable proponent of cooperation between the Liberal Democrats and "New Labour" and had regular secret meetings with Tony Blair to discuss the possibility of a coalition government.

This was despite Labour's opinion poll showings from late 1992 onwards, virtually all suggesting that they would gain a majority at the next election, particularly in the first year or so of Blair's leadership following his appointment in mid-1994.

Ashdown's successor as Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, deliberately allowed the JCC to slip into abeyance until it effectively stopped meeting.

[39] After leaving frontline British politics, he accepted the post of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina on 27 May 2002,[40] reflecting his long-time advocacy of international intervention in that region.

[43][44] On 14 March 2002, Ashdown testified as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of Slobodan Milošević at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

[46] After the Delić claims, Ashdown supplied the Tribunal with grid coordinates and a cross-section of the ground indicating that he could see the locations concerned.

The result was that the Liberal Democrats returned eight MPs, but the technical difference from the exit poll was not enough to save him from several requests to carry out his vow.

[50] In June 2007, the BBC reported that Ashdown had been offered and rejected the Cabinet post of Northern Ireland secretary by incoming Labour Party prime minister Gordon Brown.

[51] Ashdown was later asked by US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Prime Minister Gordon Brown to take charge of the Allied effort in Afghanistan,[52][53] though an unnamed source is quoted in a January 2008 Reuters report indicating that Ashdown was also approached by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and met with the Afghan president Hamid Karzai secretly in Kuwait to discuss the post which he later accepted.

[55] On 7 March, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide was appointed as the UN representative for Afghanistan, stating "I'm not Paddy Ashdown, but don't under-estimate me.

"[56] Ashdown was a member of the Governing Council of Interpeace, an international peacebuilding organisation,[57] and also served as President of Chatham House.