Paddy Ashdown says voters are being let down by professional politicians with no life experience.
The former Liberal Democrat leader and writer, who is appearing at the Write On Kew literary festival next month, was 42 when he was first elected to Parliament in 1983.
Claiming that there were too many politicians who “have never done anything else but politics”, Lord Ashdown said: “In my time in politics, it has become a profession, not a calling.
“Among politicians who I can remember, the great Denis Healey and Edward Heath, in his way, were broad people who had many other interests but politics and I think one of the problems with our politics is that our politicians have never done anything else with their lives.
“I was elected late, I was a soldier and a diplomat on the darker edge of what goes on in that area, I was a businessman, I was unemployed.
“All of those things gave me a much wider view of life and being a writer and being interested in literature gives you a dimension you need. We are all better as broad people rather than narrow people and that is true for politics too.”
Lord Ashdown, 75, said he has always made time to write during his years in Parliament. His new book, Games Of Spies, is about a British agent operating undercover in France, the German officer tasked with tracking him down and a French resistance leader who eventually betrays him.
Lord Ashdown said: “Almost everything you think and believe about the Second World War turns out to be the opposite — the Gestapo officer never kills anyone, never tortures anyone and actually takes them out to dinner to get them to betray their country, the young British agent kills people for a pastime and the French Right-wing aristocrat turns out in the end to be a strange kind of traitor.
“Nobody was who the propaganda told us they should be. That is what fascinates people — and wartime stories fascinate me because it is ordinary people pushed into extraordinary events.”
Games Of Spies is published by William Collins on September 22, price £20. Write On Kew runs from September 22-25. For more information, visit writeon.kew.org
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