As Mr Ashdown quits, will his party disappear into oblivion?

THE BIGGEST tribute to Paddy Ashdown is that such important questions have been raised by his impending departure. They are questions which go to the heart of government. What happens to relations between his party and Labour? How will the promised referendum on electoral reform be affected? What future will there be for the Lib/Lab Cabinet committee?

Compare these questions with those at the time when Ashdown's most recent predecessors announced their resignations. Speculation after the departure of Jeremy Thorpe in the 1970s centred on his own personal future, a male model and a deceased dog. The party had become so irrelevant, the main area of contention in its subsequent leadership contest was over whether one of the candidates, John Pardoe, had been the beneficiary of a hair transplant.

In 1988, when David Steel walked away from the debris of the SDP/Lib Alliance, the main question being asked was whether the Liberals could survive at all. What is more, Steel manoeuvred in the 1980s, when the political climate was far more conducive to a third party, with Labour and the Tories vacating the centre ground. Ashdown faced the possibility of being swallowed alive by New Labour's dash to the "radical centre".

Instead, 11 years after his leadership began, Ashdown marches off stage to the drumbeat of those flatteringly big questions being asked of himself and his party. Yet the questions suggest also that he is leaving behind much unfinished business. For however big they are in relation to the future pattern of British politics, they remain unresolved. Even more tantalising, Ashdown's departure risks a resolution which he will find hard to stomach.

Without his guiding hand, the chances of a return to traditional tribal politics are increased. During the next six months, he will work hard to avoid such an outcome, but the momentum is moving away already from the Ashdown vision of greater co-operation between his party and New Labour. For the vision is dependent on electoral reform.

More immediately, Ashdown's interim form of constructive opposition needs the promise of a referendum in the near future to keep his wary colleagues on board. As I wrote on Monday, even Lord Jenkins puts the chances of a plebiscite within five years as under 50/50. It is far from clear that a poll would be winnable even then. Without electoral reform, co-operative politics has limited short-term value. For in reality, parliamentary arithmetic dictates the attitude of parties towards each other. When a governing party needs support in the Commons, tribal instincts evaporate surprisingly quickly. Even John Prescott would hold the hand of his opposite number in the Lib Dems if the survival of the Government was at stake. Similarly, John Major was forever pouring whisky down the throats of Lib Dem MPs as he sought support over the Maastricht legislation.

But Major's parliamentary nightmare was a rare one. Nearly always the first-past-the-post system will deliver one party a thumping majority. Indeed, much time is wasted during election campaigns speculating on what might happen in a hung parliament, when there has been only one since the Second World War, in February 1974. Yet such an unlikely scenario was Ashdown's only hope of a coalition in 1997, and would be if he had clung on until the next election.

In my view, electoral reform is less likely now than it has been for many years. Last November, the Jenkins Report had the potential to make great historical waves. It did not. Instead, the elegant words were the equivalent of pebbles causing a few ripples, before being brushed aside by a much bigger gust from a different direction. In Labour's ranks, the first-past-the-posters are smiling, looking forward to further vindication when PR in the Euro elections this summer loses them more seats than would have been the case otherwise. Even senior Labour supporters of electoral reform are not especially keen on Jenkins' proposals. "I would support the Alternative vote, but not this messy compromise", is a common reaction. The momentum towards electoral reform has gone into reverse.

This, combined with the related factor of Blair's continuing equivocation on the issue, will encourage the tribalist instincts of the Lib Dems. Such instincts are far greater than those in the souls of many Labour traditionalists, as anyone who attends their party conferences will testify.

I remember reporting their 1992 conference in Harrogate, following the Tories' fourth election win in a row. Before the conference, Ashdown had raised, very tentatively, the prospect of co-operating with other parties in the light of the Conservatives' apparent invincibility. Activist after activist stood up to declare their horror at such a prospect, insisting that the party's national objective should be to form the next government. It was the same sort of horror expressed by some of them when the joint Cabinet committee was formed.

Too many Liberal Democrats manage to combine self-righteousness and naivete in equal measure. It is a miracle Ashdown has taken them as far as he has.

It is quite possible that they will pick a leader now who will take them to the promised land of indignant impotence. Such a strategy would be a big mistake. A senior cabinet minister, one of those rare figures in Blair's Government who is supportive of closer co-operation, told me that "the gloves would be off and the Liberals annihilated" if a new leader reverted to the old tribalism.

At the moment, with New Labour still dominant in the polls, it is the Lib Dems who risk being marginalised. New Labour alone would become Blair's vehicle for the realignment of British politics. But before most of the cabinet rubs its hands in glee at such a prospect, ministers should contemplate their rather emptier lives in the 1980s. It is not just the Liberal Democrats who have much to lose by ditching the Blair/Ashdown strategy. During the long years of opposition, the third party was effectively part of an anti-Labour coalition, rather than an anti-Tory one. Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock were attacked on two fronts, by the Conservative and the Alliance. They never stood a chance.

There will come a time when this Government is unpopular, and when the Conservatives come to their senses. Labour could face such an assault again, if the centre-left finds itself occupied once more by two parties fighting each other.

There are pointers to suggest that the Blair/Ashdown strategy is still on course. But I suspect the moment has passed. Already, too many ministers have forgotten what it was like to lose elections, while on the national stage too many Liberal Democrats prefer the purity of opposition to the whiff of power.

Steve Richards is political editor of the `New Statesman'