The Guardian view on Charles Kennedy’s legacy: Lochaber no more

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/02/guardian-view-on-charles-kennedy-legacy

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These have been truly brutal days for the Liberal Democrats. And the brutality shows no sign of lessening. Humbled in the general election, in which they lost two-thirds of their votes, 48 of their 56 seats and many of their best MPs, the Lib Dems have now also lost their most popular and successful leader of modern times. Charles Kennedy became leader in 1999 and led the party to new highs in votes and seats in successive general elections, culminating in the Lib Dems’ highest ever total of Commons seats, 62, in 2005. On Monday, less than a month after losing the matchlessly beautiful Highlands seat he had represented at Westminster for 32 years, he died at his Lochaber home aged 55.

Mr Kennedy was a liberal social democrat who knew what he believed and loved what he knew. His clarity of intellect was reflected in a clarity of utterance which gave him a special connection with the public, who prized him for his ability to speak human. He was consistently unafraid to take reasoned risks on subjects where he was consistently in the right – in favour of merger between the SDP and the Liberals, in favour of higher taxation to pay for education, against the Iraq war and, five years ago, against coalition with the Conservatives. In his later years Mr Kennedy battled alcoholism. Yet for much of his career, from the late 1980s until the middle of the 2000s, his was among the best and most authentic voices of the revived liberal tradition. His passing is the sombre end of a golden political era. Lochaber no more.

Yet the world still turns; and it always turns towards the future, not the past. Twenty-four hours on, nominations will close tomorrow for the contest to choose the next Lib Dem leader. This will be an unenviable inheritance. With Nick Clegg stepping down – he would be an ideal candidate to succeed Sir Malcolm Rifkind as chair of parliament’s intelligence and security committee – his successor faces a stony path in whichever direction he looks.

Five years in coalition have battered the Lib Dems’ electoral support and destroyed much of the electoral base built up in the Kennedy years and before. They have left the party discredited in the public mind by its experience in government and disqualified, unless wounds heal, from reclaiming its pre-2010 role as a party of oppositional protest. Other parties – nationalists, Greens and Ukip – now claim that territory. To renew and rebuild the vital place of liberalism in our politics will not be easy.

A key decision facing the party’s next leader is whether to embrace or reject the legacy of coalition. Mr Kennedy would have been fair in his judgment, but on the rejectionist side. However, he would have seen opportunities too, if the party is clear about its priorities and direction. He would have seen an uncertain Labour party, a frustrated Green movement, a decentralising spirit, a fresh impatience with the electoral system and, above all, a battle for Britain’s place in Europe. It is a great loss that Mr Kennedy will play no part in Britain’s political reshaping. But his reforming social democratic and European instincts will live on if the next Lib Dem leader takes the party on the kind of political journey that his late lamented colleague would have favoured.