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On July 1988, the day Paddy Ashdown was elected Leader of his party and this diary begins, the men from the Inland Revenue had to be hurried from the party's headquarters so he could make his first Leader's statement to the press. (The Revenue had called because of our persistent failure to pay National Insurance contributions). The party was virtually bankrupt, morale almost extinguished. In the depths of despair eleven months later, with everything apparently dissolving around him, he wrote in his diary, I'm plagued by the nightmare that the party that started with Gladstone will end with Ashdown.