 Ashdown had regular secret meetings with Tony Blair to discuss the possibility of a coalition government.In 1997, after the election of the New Labour government led by Blair, he and Ashdown created a Joint Cabinet Committee (JCC) comprising senior Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians to discuss the implementation of the two parties' shared priorities for constitutional reform.Ashdown' wrote later in his autobiography that the remit of the JCC was later expanded to include other issues on which Blair and Ashdown saw scope for co-operation between the two parties.