Viva Brighton Issue #45 November 2016

BOOKS
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Paddy Ashdown
Norman Baker interviews his former boss
Paddy Ashdown may be best
known for his role as one-time
leader of the Lib Dems, but like
the best politicians, he has a hinterland
far away from politics.
For Paddy this included a career
as a foreign office diplomat,
time with MI6 and as a member
of the Special Boat Squad.
He is also a prolific author and
this is his ninth book, and third
about the Second World War.
Game Of Spies is the riveting
true story of a lethal triangle involving
a British spy, a Gestapo
officer, and a leader in the
French Resistance, in wartime
occupied Bordeaux.
What makes this book groundbreaking is that
he has been able to access the archives both of
the British secret agent Roger Landes, and the
Gestapo counter-espionage officer charged with
finding him, Friedrich Dohse. His partner on the
book (‘collaborator’ is perhaps best avoided here),
Sylvie Young, a French woman, has added to the
mix by unearthing many hitherto unexamined
French files of the period.
Paddy tells me he regards Friedrich Dohse as the
book’s most interesting character, not least because
his memoir is the only known one written
by a Gestapo officer. His intelligent approach was
markedly different from his Gestapo colleagues
in other ways too. He eschewed violence and torture,
and his preferred method of interrogation
was to invite his prisoners to dinner. It was an
approach that brought some success, notably in
‘turning’ the third key player in this story, Andre
Grandclement.
It’s clear that Paddy warmed to this swashbuckling
tale, no doubt as he
warmed to his own SBS adventures.
Notwithstanding the
horrors it describes along the
way, the book reveals a touch
of wistful nostalgia for a time
when people faced hard, cold
edges, and were, as he put it to
me, not “protected by cotton
wool as they are today”.
The narrative rolls on apace,
without sacrificing depth and
insight along the way. On the
contrary, Paddy builds a picture
of the characters, and indeed
the nations to which they
belong, which is much more
thoughtful and nuanced than the 2D cartoon
versions we are sometimes presented with. He
delights in “breaking lazily received notions”.
Is the book just an historical tale, albeit a fascinating
and meticulously researched one, I ask
Paddy, or can it inform the world today?
“Those who forget history are condemned
to repeat it,” he answers, without a pause for
thought. And he clearly feels rueful, perhaps
even ashamed, that the Britain that offered so
many of its young men and women to free other
countries in Europe is now the country with the
most curmudgeonly attitude to those Europeans
outside its borders.
More ominous still, he sees in the disorientation
of people and the distrust of politicians and those
in power a parallel between the 1930s and now.
So a good read, and maybe an important one, too.
As may be his next book, about the internal German
resistance to Hitler. Norman Baker
Meet the Author: An Evening with Paddy Ashdown,
Royal Pavilion Music Room, 17th, 6.30pm, £15.50
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