Talented Charles Kennedy endured unhappy final years

Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, died yesterday aged 55. A shy man, he retreated into the background after he lost his House of Commons seat for Ross, Skye and Lochaber in the early hours of May 8th last. It was a seat that had defined his life, for good, or ill.

The same word was mentioned again and again yesterday during coverage of his too early death – “demons” – for Kennedy had them by the score, mixed in with a prodigious talent.

His post-election retreat was not unusual. Colleagues who helped him clear out his Westminster office were then not surprised not to hear from him. It had often been thus in recent decades because of the alcoholism he endured.

Modest cottage

He was found at his modest cottage outside Fort William by his close friend Carole Macdonald, the widow of his lifelong best friend, Murdo. The circumstances are not suspicious, simply sad.

The last few years of Kennedy’s life had not been joy-filled. His eight-year marriage failed in 2010. His mother, Mary died last year in a nursing home; his father died at 88 in early April, just as the election fired into life.

His brother, Ian suffered serious ill-health last year as well. For years, he had driven his better-known sibling around the UK’s largest constituency, one where the Kennedys have deep roots.

In the 19th century, the family were on the verge of emigrating to Canada, like so many others, until they were given a croft across the River Lochy from Inverlochy Castle, where Ben Nevis towers majestically in the background.

Besides being an MP of 32 years standing until his defeat, Kennedy was a crofter, too, regaling people in Westminster recently with stories of the problems he was having with sheep on his land.

Kennedy, if he had little appetite for detail, was right more often than not on the major issues affecting the Liberal Democrats – condemning the Iraq war before it began; his party’s about-turn on tuition fees, along with opposing the coalition with the Conservatives.

He stood down from the party leadership in 2006, when colleagues – angrily, reluctantly, but, in the end, brutally – finally made it clear that they would no longer put up with his erratic behaviour. He struggled afterwards.

Ever with a deft touch, he had become a TV star on Have I Got News For You and other programmes from the 1990s onwards, displaying an infectious, self-deprecating humour that the audience found infectious.

Everything about his lifestyle was unhealthy: the 40-a-day cigarette habit; his lack of exercise. His nickname during university years was “Taxi”. In Westminster, he arrived into a political lair that at the time floated on alcohol.

Own stories

Everyone yesterday had their own stories about him.

Nicola Sturgeon

remembered being with him on a parliamentary trip to Australia, when both of them skived off for a few hours to watch the influential Scottish movie,

Trainspotting

in a Melbourne cinema.

“We were the only two Scots in the audience at that time, so we drew some very strange looks from other people as we were uproariously laughing at lots of jokes that nobody else in the cinema were even beginning to understand,” she said.