But although he was tough Mr Ashdown would always be fair never showing favouritism Until now

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Published: July 26, 2010

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But although he was tough, Mr Ashdown would always be fair, never showing favouritism

Until now. Only time will tell whether this stance will work to the Lib Dems’ advantage: it is still possible that in the event of a hung parliament he could deny office both to Mr Blair and Mr Major, threatening a second general election if Labour is not prepared to meet his terms for co-operation. Indeed, any hint of associating with the Tories now seems, to Mr Ashdown, more of an electoral liability than an asset.His new strategy carries risks. Tory HQ will lump Labour and the Liberal Democrats together, attacking one for the policies of the other. So if Labour politicians say: “No new taxes”, Conservatives will point out that the Liberal Democrats would raise income tax by 1p to pay for improved education.Mr Ashdown’s calculation is that the policies which make his party most distinctive – constitutional reform, decentralisation, environmental improvement and a better education system – now stand a measurably better chance of being adopted by a Blair government than any credible alternative.The weakness of Mr Ashdown’s position is that he has made his move without securing anything in return from Mr Blair. For, although Mr Ashdown remains at arm’s length from Mr Blair’s party, he clearly sees it as one with which he can do business.

Mr Ashdown has for some time felt more at ease with Labour than the Tories. But he has kept quiet, careful not to frighten Tories who might be worried that, in voting Lib Dem, they might be letting Labour in by the back door With Mr Blair as leader, that concern has diminished. The Liberal Democrats will refuse to keep the Tories in office if they lose their overall majority.
This is an extraordinary announcement, ending Mr Ashdown’s longstanding policy of maintaining an equal distance between his party and its rivals. His despair with the Tories highlights the depth of their unpopularity and a widespread belief that nothing now can save them.This historic shift also shows how much he thinks Labour has changed. “Get up that mountain, Blair,” he would scream at Labour’s newly recruited leader.

“You horrible little man,” he would boom as the hapless John Major fell into a stream. You could easily imagine Paddy Ashdown as a square-jawed Outward Bound course instructor, giving them hell. He was irritated to have cut his nose but otherwise quite untroubled Nothing would deter him from the planned outing. And while he got ready, nothing distracted him, either, from noticing how many pine cones (Pinus pinea) were put on the fire, though outside they lay thick on the ground for miles.Jeremy TreglownBruce Edward Arthur Pollard Urquhart, landowner, conservationist: born India 14 March 1908; married 1939 Margaret Koppel (one son, three daughters); OBE 1992; died lbiza 22 May 1995.. Even at his most cosmopolitan he never lost the Aberdonian resilience and parsimony which had enabled him to keep the estate going. One dark evening a couple of winters ago, before going out to dinner in Santa Eulalia, the octogenarian climbed up on the roof to mend something and fell 10 feet on to a stone drain. He also promoted the use of wood in house-building and was an early advocate and successful importer of Scandinavian wood-burning stoves.He drove himself very hard and it was partly to protect him from himself that Bobs encouraged the Ibizencan venture, which they first embarked on with their friends Michael and Lavinia Smiley, of Castle Fraser.

There could not have been a greater contrast than between the magnificence of Craigston and the cottage at Santa Eulalia, and the new life enhanced the old one for them both.Scotland always remained his true home. But Urquhart continued to do his most inventive work in forestry and what would come to be called ecology. Writing in specialist journalists about his practical experiments, he contributed to a new understanding of natural regeneration, argued for the co-existence of forestry with farming, and disseminated his methods of cultivating certain kinds of tree, especially poplars.As a consultant, he planned and managed forestry planting on many estates in Scotland and England, among them Mar (recently bought for the nation with funds from the National Lottery). This Bruce Urquhart could seem – like his house – grand, austere and a little remote, impressions exaggerated by deafness and by the way he held his head back and gazed along his straight nose like a shortish guardsman. Unlike most lairds of his generation, though, he did not care much for shooting or fishing.

Instead, he planted hundreds of acres of woodland with his own hands. (The hands of his four children, too, they reminded him, as well as of his foresters.)
Craigston was mortgaged when he inherited it from his father during the Second World War, but while other, richer Scottish estates were being sold off, Bruce Urquhart painstakingly built this one back up, tree by tree. So it was natural that he later seemed most sure of himself, if not most relaxed, in his woods. He was always keen to talk about the minutiae of forestry and conservation – areas where his pioneering expertise was acknowledged by Fellowship of the Linnean Society and by an OBE. But with him the greenest thoughts in the greenest of shades could be startlingly disrupted. Well into his eighties he would break off in mid-sentence, scramble up a tree and attack some superfluous branch with one of the saws and hatchets which, whenever he was out of doors, seemed to grow out of the ends of his arms.From an Aberdonian perspective, the least familiar Bruce Urquhart was the bohemian who, with his wife Bobs, romantically spent much of every winter among painters, writers and theatre people in lbiza.


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