Menzies Campbell: My Autobiography
Menzies Campbell
Hodder & Stoughton, 325pp, £20
Perhaps it should not be surprising that the autobiography of the only political party leader ever to have run for his country in the Olympics should read like a series of sprints. But, at least in its political sections, the book affords little insight into what Menzies Campbell was racing for, apart from to add to his collection of medals. His passion for athletics started young. Aged seven, he was ‘mesmerised by the crackling commentary of the 1948 Olympic Games’. By the mid-1960s, dubbed the ‘Flying Scotsman’, he was a sporting celebrity. Campbell was the first Liberal Democrat MP since Clement Freud to have been more famous for his achievements outside politics than in. For Campbell, in becoming an MP he was doing the Liberal party a favour: ‘my legal practice was going so well I wondered whether I could afford to be an MP.’ David Steel ‘offered me a deal: if I stood in the election I could do all the legal work I wanted if I became an MP’. Politics for Campbell seems to have been at least as much about ‘being’ as about ‘doing’.
There is little sense of purpose, of vision, of why he wanted to be Lib Dem leader, apart from a generous desire to save Charles Kennedy from the burdens of leadership. Ming’s account of his time as Lib Dem defence and foreign affairs spokesman dwells predominantly on his battles to thwart the attempts of jealous parliamentary colleagues to demote him.
The former Liberal Democrat leader’s gruelling battle with cancer is courageously written and almost painful to read. Recounting his days at Glasgow University with that golden generation of John Smith, Donald Dewar and Derry Irvine, Campbell affords the reader a treasure trove of vignettes. But there is little to explain the roots and development of his Liberal convictions. For the memoir of a politician who both aspired to and attained the front rank, there is surprisingly little political insight. Perhaps that is an insight in itself.