Captain Ashdown takes the strain

Rachel Sylvester and Marie Woolf go first class with the Lib Dem leader on the eve of a crucial party conference

IT IS a chilly afternoon in Somerset. The air smells faintly of manure, and the station, in the middle of a field, is deserted. Captain Ashdown strides into the spartan waiting-room, all ruddy cheeks and crinkly eyes. "Hello all!" he shouts imperiously, proffering a little finger in greeting. This is all he has free because he is holding a double-hinged briefcase bulging with cigars and assorted technology in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.

"Hello, sir," replies the stationmaster with a nervous nod, and prints out a first-class ticket. The Liberal Democrat leader seizes it from the kiosk and marches off, then has to be called back to sign the credit- card slip.

The mobile phone rings. There is a crisis in London. Paddy's secretary has broken her toe against a table while wandering barefoot around his office. "Becks, I'm horrified," her boss barks down the line. "Take lots of painkillers and have the rest of the week off."

The train pulls in. Ashdown charges on board, commandeers a table and starts tapping into a palmtop computer. "I can keep up with what the party's thinking on the internet sites - but the anorak tendency get quite a shock when I suddenly appear and start answering their complaints," he beams.

Ashdown oozes energy from every pore. It is exhausting just sitting opposite him for five minutes. His staff - half his age of 57 - find it hard to keep up with his 6am starts, hours in the gym and constant e-mails of enthusiastic ideas. His leadership style is still faintly military, a throwback to his officer days, and the civvie MPs he commands do not always like it.

"He is becoming more authoritarian and consulting less and less," complains one.

Like the Action Man everyone always compares him to, Ashdown is faintly plastic; you wonder who the man behind the polished responses and colonial manners (childhood in India, public-school education) really is.

The mobile phone bleats again. This time the call is from someone called Roy. Paddy rushes over to the other side of the carriage to take it in private. It is, his aide confirms, a Very Important conversation. Lord Jenkins - if indeed it is he - is conducting a review of the voting system which could catapult Ashdown into the Cabinet. The co-founder of the SDP is drawing up proposals for elections to be conducted on a more proportional basis, and, if the country backs this Liberal Democrat dream, Paddy could eventually lead his party into a coalition with Labour.

But the activists are angry. They think their leader is selling out to Tony Blair, betraying them for the sake of his own career. Over cosy dinners with the Prime Minister, he has agreed to take part in a joint committee on the constitution, to engage in "constructive opp-osition", even to water down the commitment to wholesale PR. The Liberal Democrat conference next week will be one of the most tense the party has seen. And he knows it. "Yes, it's a pivotal conference, crucial. It will decide the way forward. The issue is very simple: does the party want to take up a position to the left of Labour? I think it would be silly for us to do so. Of course, there are people who take different views."

Paddy was always a Labour man until a "bobble-hatted activist" turned up on the doorstep of his Somerset cottage. "I invited him in for a cup of tea and he convinced me. I realised I had been a Liberal all along - it was like putting on an old overcoat that had been hanging up for years."

He thinks Blair is a secret convert to the cause and is borrowing his own ideas. "He is a man on a journey. What he calls the Third Way, I call Liberalism." Ashdown argues that the old left/right divide is outdated. "The really big issues in politics now are Europe, constitutional change, the environment. The interesting division is between the modernisers and the conservatives - there are conservatives in all parties ... I am closer to Frank Field on the issue of welfare than I am to some of my own party." He thinks politics will turn from a battle between Labour and Tory into one between reformers and stick-in-the-muds. "We are in the most fluid period of politics we have seen in the last half-century. The Procrustean beds in which Labour and Tory MPs are forced to lie are manifestly incapable of maintaining them. Sooner or later British politics will be reshaped."

Voting reform would, of course, be the catalyst for this shift. But the Prime Minister is not yet convinced that PR is a good idea. "This is the big test of whether Mr Blair is a democrat, a pluralist, a moderniser or a control freak," he says. The Lib Dems have always argued that the number of MPs elected from each party should directly reflect the proportion of votes cast. Now, their leader has agreed that there should be simply a "broadly proportional" system. "We have got to look at it not as purists but as political realists," he says defiantly.

That kind of compromise is part of what he calls "being on the field" and playing the political game. Increasingly Labour and the Lib Dems are competing in the same team. Ashdown thinks it is "inevitable" that there will be a coalition if PR goes ahead. "At the moment the most likely coalition would be Lib Dems and the Labour Party, but if the Tory party becomes a centre-right party they could be involved. We are going to see a loosening up of politics; the idea of parties working together and co-operating. Labour and Liberal Democrats are natural partners in that process."

Ashdown is convinced that he is finally on the verge of something big, and he is determined to prove wrong those who believe that the Liberals are a peripheral third force. His whole life seems to have been dedicated to achieving what everyone else said was impossible. "My school reports said that I would never learn a language. I got five out of 200 for school French," he says. "Then when I was a young bachelor in Singapore I discovered there was a word in Malay that meant `let's take all our clothes off, have a party and tell dirty stories' so I decided I should learn this language. Then I took two-and-a-half years to learn Mandarin."

Those who know him say this determination was caused by the collapse of his father's pig-farming business when he was 16. There was not enough money for young Paddy to go to university and, as if to compensate, he has acquired several obscure languages, an encyclopaedic knowledge of literary quotations, and a repertoire of long words which he drops at every opportunity, making his trendy advisers cringe.

From Bedford College he joined the Royal Marines and went into the Special Boat Squadron, the naval version of the SAS. There have been lots of rumours that he was a British spy. Does he drink his martinis shaken, not stirred? "I can't talk about that or I'd have to kill you with my bare hands," he says. "I was a diplomat, that's all I can say. In so far as people are allowed to be in intelligence they are allowed not to be identified." But if he wasn't a spy, couldn't he say? "Oh no, we're trained not to discuss these things," he grins.

After 10 years leading a raggle-taggle party, Mr Ashdown may be for the first time on the verge of gaining real power. This is a prospect he relishes, and a prize he is willing to hang on for. Though some in the party mutter that it is time for him to retire to write his memoirs, he says he will hang on "to lead my party to power".

But not on any terms. "Would I serve in somebody else's Cabinet to administer somebody else's policy? No. Would I serve in a government that was dedicated to the things I believe in? The answer is yes." But there are many obstacles between Captain Ashdown and the elusive power he craves. This may be one mission that finally turns out to be impossible.