Charles Kennedy was an outsider – that was his strength

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/02/charles-kennedy-outsider-strength

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So many memories of Charles Kennedy flooded into my mind when I heard about his death early this morning, but two in particular. The first is the scene in the House of Commons in 2003 as he entered the chamber immediately before the vote on the Iraq war.

We have forgotten since then how the ranks of the parliamentary Conservative party – though not all by any means – were cheerleaders for the war, and I can remember them standing in their seats baying, bragging and gesticulating at Kennedy as he walked in.

I remember his dignity in the face of that. He was always an outsider – and Lib Dems are best led, in my opinion, by outsiders. But he was never quite such an outsider as he was then.

Kennedy had been undecided about his position on the war in the months that led up to the vote – the besetting sin of Lib Dem advisers has always been their commitment to positioning. But, having taken the decision to oppose – apparently in the middle of an interview with David Frost – he stuck to it.

And having stuck to it, the electoral benefit was almost neither here nor there (the party won 62 seats in 2005). The important thing was, because he stood out, there was still a chink in the UK establishment which could look people in the face afterwards. It was a small chink of light that kept the establishment open, and we have Kennedy to thank for it.

The second picture I have is of him launching his 2005 election campaign with a sheet of paper.

On it was written the 10 points which the party used, in a rather unwieldy fashion, to set out their case. In the event, he folded it in half, looked at the top, talked about the first point and then turned it over and talked about the last one.

Despite this, the result was a flawless, inspiring, unrhetorical but still powerful case for his party and mine.

He was never exactly well-organised, and it was frustrating for speechwriters – I was one at the time – but it worked. Nobody could turn a phrase in a way that might reach unpolitical people as Charles could.

It is strange to think that, even two general elections ago, the major parties dared to hold press conferences every morning and I was writing his words for some of these.

In the event, his wife Sarah gave birth and I had to rewrite them for Ming Campbell to use (“Could you rewrite them with longer sentences?” I was asked).

He was always surprising. For all the criticisms you might make of his leadership, they are all strangely paradoxical. He was able to speak directly to people outside the Westminster world, yet he was painfully shy and this gap between appearance and reality seemed to loom large.

Nobody could turn a phrase in a way that might reach unpolitical people as Charles could. Nobody was sharper in debate

He failed to create the kind of intellectual ferment that successful parties need, yet nobody was sharper in debate.

He was hardly a brave leader, yet his decision to oppose Blair on Iraq was courageous and important and, in the light of events since, absolutely right. We have to remember that he did so in the days when the dossiers seemed less obviously dodgy, and people still claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He has been semi-detached recently from the party, unhappy about the decision to go into coalition. But this may be the greatest paradox. Because if David Steel begat the Liberal Democrat party, it was Charles Kennedy who was its first midwife.

He was the only one of the five SDP MPs in 1987 to back the merger. But in a long and expensive phone call from holiday in Turkey, Charles persuaded Bob Maclennan to join him. Because of this, the subsequent SDP vote went narrowly in favour and the parties merged. Kennedy joked after this bitter debate that the SDP was the only party where people could storm off the platform shouting: “Disingenuous! Disingenuous!”

He was then president of the party during the Ashdown years, and his unstinting efforts on the rubber chicken circuit gave a peculiarly Kennedy-esque spirit to the party that was especially his – gentle, civilised, humorous; nobody’s poodles, but not Rottweilers either, as he put it.

It was this approach which was such an important part of the alchemical mix that led to the electoral breakthrough in 1997.

As a Lib Dem, I often found myself disagreeing with him – sometimes in person, catching a word with him as he snatched a fag outside a policy committee meeting – but I identified with him, as a human being in the Westminster quagmire, as so many people did.

I also admired his absolutely unique approach. He was quietly, unassumingly, a shaper of history, and would have been again.