Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Leader of the Liberal Democrats since 1988, a former soldier and diplomat, voted Frontbencher of the Year.
On the island
Eight records
Second movement from String Quintet in C major, Op. 163 (D. 956)
Yo-Yo Ma and the Cleveland Quartet
my first record, I suppose, is the one I would want to come back to whenever I needed calming down and whenever I needed uh that special solace
Emma Kirkby, Taverner Players, Andrew Parrott
it reminds me of her and the gift that she left with me
Concerto in G for two mandolins, RV 532
to remember her [my daughter] and the joy she gives me
Kung Shanyayu (Birdsong on Kung Mountain)
to remind me of that happy two and a half years with my family and how much I've got from contact with the Chinese nation
Che gelida manina (Your Tiny Hand is Frozen) from La BohèmeFavourite
Giuseppe di Stefano, Orchestra of La Scala, Milan, Antonino Votto
to remember that [his wife crying] and for the beauty of the music
Sabbath Morning at Sea from Sea Pictures, Op. 37
Janet Baker, London Symphony Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli
always reminds me of that particular incident
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:50Did you ever come under pressure to change your name from your local constituency body?
They did when I arrived there and they decided that um well I'd uh recently returned from Geneva having resigned from the Foreign Service and they wanted me to call myself Captain Jeremy John Durham Ashton, Royal Marines retired and I said, Well, if that's what you want me to do, you better choose another candidate.
Presenter asks
5:51So you have no memories of [India]?
I have one memory of it. It was of coming down out of the plains, out of the hills, down to the plains and going to Bombay. I can't remember any detail of it, but I do remember the train stopping outside a station and I remember even as a four-year-old feeling the fear in the train. It was very full. And then we steamed slowly through a station on which nightmares recalled it to me throughout my childhood and my adolescence. There was, as I recall it anyway, with the eyes of a child, no place that you could have put a foot down without ste treading on dismembered bodies. And the smell, of course, was one of putrefaction. It was part of the um part of the partition riots.
Presenter asks
9:35You apparently didn't make a huge academic impression at school, and yet in your twenties you started teaching yourself all these obscure languages like Malay and Dayak. How did that come about?
The keepsakes
The book
John Donne
John Donne just has it all the wit, the artifice, and particularly the passion. About both things profane and things sacred.
Well, there were two things that uh school did for me. I mean first of all on languages I got the world's record low mark for French. I got five out of two hundred and my school reports are redolent with uh things that I will never learn languages, which of course is just about the only skill I discovered in later life. But the two things my school gave me the first was a certain self-confidence, which was soon rubbed out of me, but not a bad thing to start uh life at eighteen. The second much more powerful and a much more sustained gift was one given me by two teachers, um an English teacher and a history teacher. who I suppose up until sixteen this had been assembling a sort of bundle of tinder that somebody had to light, and they lit it, and what they left me with was an inquiring mind and the desire to continue to learn.
Presenter asks
14:08In a sense, you were orphaned at eighteen, because your family emigrated to Australia and you stayed here and joined the Royal Marines. Then within three years you were married. Are those facts linked? Were you in need of security?
I think they are linked. Um and my mother, who is a very perceptive commentator on these, said it was linked. Um but uh I met my wife when I was eighteen. Uh eighteen and a half. In fact, we got married twenty nine years ago to day. We got married then in military sin. This was a forbidden thing to do. We had to ask permission of their lords of the admiralty because we weren't allowed to get married before we were 25 and I quite disgracefully got married ten days before my twenty-first birthday. Our kids came about four years later and even then we weren't allowed to have quarters, we weren't allowed to have any kind of marriage alliances and when I went abroad, as I spent a lot of time abroad, Jane had to make her way out to me by hitching lifts on RAF aircraft.
Presenter asks
21:42So why did you do it [give up your diplomatic career for politics]?
Because I felt I had to, because I I mean it it's very difficult now to rationalize it.
Presenter asks
32:39How great is your ambition to be Prime Minister?
Oh, you don't want to do my job and lead a party. If you don't want to do it from Downing Street, you might as well give up, if you're not prepared to have that as an ambition.
“music and especially classical music that my mother introduced me to and she literally she it was like showing me a spring which has gone on bubbling and producing new joys every time I dip into it, and it is the one sure source of solace, and something more than that, something that lifts you above ordinary life and gives you a different level of existence.”
“I have one memory of it. It was of coming down out of the plains, out of the hills, down to the plains and going to Bombay. I can't remember any detail of it, but I do remember the train stopping outside a station and I remember even as a four-year-old feeling the fear in the train. It was very full. And then we steamed slowly through a station on which nightmares recalled it to me throughout my childhood and my adolescence. There was, as I recall it anyway, with the eyes of a child, no place that you could have put a foot down without ste treading on dismembered bodies. And the smell, of course, was one of putrefaction. It was part of the um part of the partition riots.”
“I think it's pompous. I think it's separated from the reality of life. I think it deals in a rather um childish form in the great issues of our day. I think it is literally ridiculous, ludicrous, that we sh stand there and shout at each other instead of listening to our opinions. I think it's a wretched place, frankly.”
“And he pulled out of his pocket two slices of bread. And he pulled out of his other pocket a frog. And he put the frog between the sides of the bed and then eped them and said to them, That's survival. If you can do it, you'll survive.”
“Half of war is heroism and half is farce. On the way up the Persian Gulf I had a mad colonel who the intelligence said the Iraqis were on Kuwait airport. And we were just about to assault there, and did in due course. They weren't there, I'm glad to say. Decided that the way you impress these Arab johnnies was to put on a show. And he decided that the show, for some god knows what reason, would be a show of Scottish country dancing. So my preparations to go to war for the first time was to be dancing on the shuddering quarter deck of bulwark. And learning the Aitesome Real, dressed in an army blanket for a kilt.”