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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now a national day of mourning has been declared in Russia after 224 people died in a plane crash over Egypt. Islamic State militants have claimed responsibility for it but that is being denied by both Russia and Egypt.  It is just a month after Russia launched air strikes in Syria supporting the Assad regime and I’m joined now by the former Lib Dem leader and diplomat, Paddy Ashdown, he’s in Somerset.  A very good morning to you, Paddy, I’ve just been hearing from the Egyptian Ambassador to the UK, they think it is very unlikely that ISIS were involved in this plane crash.  Naturally they would want to claim it but what it does illustrate because it was over Sinai, does it not, that IS’s growing reach not just in Syria and Iraq but in Sinai, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, on it goes.  

LORD ASHDOWN: Good morning, Dermot, nice to be with you.  Yes, it does, it illustrates exactly that and many of us have been warning for the last, I don't know, three or four years that Syria was not about Syria, it was about something much wider, it was about a growing Sunni/Shia conflict that could now engulf the entire Middle East and that’s how it has turned out to be.  I think it was extremely foolish of us to have chosen only force, only explosives, high explosives, as the instrument by which we would try to deliver peace and tackle ISIL instead of creating a wider diplomatic context in which military force would make sense and it was extremely foolish of us to say that a primary aim of what we were trying to do in Syria was to get rid of Assad when we didn’t have the means to do that and both Russia and Teheran had the means to stop us.  So we have mishandled yet another international crisis, we are now in a position where Russia has the whip hand here.  I think the thing we can do and should do and thank goodness is at last being done, is begin to build that wider diplomatic coalition, bringing Russia in, bringing Turkey in, bringing Teheran in and then you create a regional framework in which peace is more likely, a bit like the Dayton Agreement, now 20 years old, did for Bosnia and Herzegovina.  

DM:  But it’s Russia who is now in the driving seat having taken that decision to engage militarily in Syria and our best hope is that Putin either wants to muddle towards a diplomatic solution or that is his intent.  

LORD ASHDOWN: Well Dermot, two points.  The first is the moment we chose high explosive as the only means by which we would try and influence the Syrian situation, we left the gate wide open because Mr Putin could always, and has now chosen, to outbid us.  He has got troops on the ground, we haven’t, so he has now moved in and occupied that space.  He has only done what we have allowed him to do as an act of great gross stupidity by the west not to seek to build that wider coalition.  The second point is however that my guess is that Putin will need a way out pretty soon, he is very over-extended, this is costing him a lot of money on a very weak Russian economy, it’s risking spreading instability north into the Islamic republics which are the fracture line of Russia – Chechnya, Dagestan – and finally,  he is going to discover soon that the use of air power alone does not defeat terrorists so the aim he has set himself to defeat the terrorists isn’t going to succeed.  There is real danger that he now gets sucked into a quagmire.  For the moment he has made use of our stupidity to give himself a poll position but my view is that it will be very soon before he needs a diplomatic construct as a way out and if we want the right action to take now then what the west should be doing is reaching over him to create those diplomatic contexts.  My view is that actually in the end Teheran is going to be much more interested in an alliance with a bankrupt and bellicose Russia, we should be playing that.  It has always been the case that we forget the dictum of Clausewitz which is that war is the extension of diplomacy by other means, we choose the war, we remember the war, we see a problem in the world and our first instinct is to bomb it.  I think what we should have done three years ago but what we can do now is reach out to create that wider diplomatic context which is the only context in which you can create some kind of peace, a fractured peace perhaps, in Syria and give some peace to those people who are forced to flee to Europe so they can live their lives within their own country.

DM: Let’s talk about a related issue I suppose, the Investigatory Powers Bill.  You may have seen I had Ken Clarke on earlier this morning saying it is only the modern day equivalent, the powers that have been asked for, of steaming open envelopes.  My ears pricked up because you used that phrase the last time you were in here talking to me, is it just that or is it much more?

LORD ASHDOWN: I listened again, I saw Ken and he was an absolute scamp on the powers of the House of Lords, you know perfectly well he misrepresented the government.  This was not a financial bill, it was a welfare bill and they deliberately avoided debate and thought they could do the same thing in the House of Commons and he was really naughty about that but that’s what Ken’s like.  On the other things you spoke about in particular the Investigatory Powers Bill, he’s right.  During the coalition the Lib Dems stopped the Tories doing some of the deeply egregious things damaging to our civil liberties, the Bill has now presented – judging by the Home Secretary’s comments earlier on today and we won’t know until we look at it with more scrutiny – looks to me as though it is getting towards the right direction.  Some of the worst aspects of that have now been diminished, this is a power exercise not against a class of people or single individuals, based on evidence based and subject to judicial oversight.  Those are the three key principles, they are the principles we used in the era of the steaming kettle and if those principles have been preserved in the Bill I think the Bill seems to me that it will be far, far better than many imagined it would be but if it isn’t then we will use the House of Lords to ensure that it is, you may be sure of that.  

DM: Really?  I was going to ask you that.  Tim Farron said he’d be back to the House of Lords, you’re a democrat Paddy Ashdown, you’ve only got eight MPs, surely recourse to the House of Lords is not the right way to go about it.

LORD ASHDOWN: No, you are quite wrong about this. There is a question, Dermot, about whether the House of Lords should hold up ultimately financial measures passed by the House of Commons.  By the way, the answer to that question is, we shouldn’t, it’s part of the Salisbury Convention.  The reason why we did that  with tax credits is because it is not a financial measure, it’s a statutory instrument about a piece of welfare although the government tries to pretend otherwise.  But on other issues – and this is a classic one – the House of Lords is to act as a reforming chamber when it comes to preserving our civil liberties, when it comes to preserving our freedoms, the House of Lords has an absolutely crucial role to play and we will play it.  When the House of Lords has made its case, when it has amended the Bill if it is deficient in that matter, and it returns to the House of Commons then you get into a tussle between the Lords and the Commons which the Commons will always in the end win but in the first stage we are a reforming chamber and this is precisely, constitutionally, the kind of Bill with which we should be intervening if the legislation is deficient.  So there isn’t a constitutional issue about this, there may be about the other but there isn’t about this and you may be sure we will exercise those powers in the House of Lords as a whole, Lib Dems are part of it, cross-benchers and others, to ensure that we fulfil our proper constitutional function.  

DM: Okay, Paddy Ashdown …

LORD ASHDOWN: Dermot, I’m against the House of Lords, I think it’s a ridiculous institution, we should get rid of it and have an elected second chamber but while it’s there, to protect the freedoms of the citizens of this country, we will use its powers.  

DM: All right, Paddy Ashdown, thanks a lot.