Charles Kennedy: A Tragic Flaw
Greg Hurst
Politico’s, 307pp, £18.99
Tony Blair is said to have once asked Paddy Ashdown: ‘Charles Kennedy – all that talent. Why is he so idle?’ Greg Hurst’s detailed biography suggests that such a question was both often asked as well as rather unfair.
The short answer to Blair’s question, as we now all know, was alcoholism. Hurst traces Kennedy’s problem back to his student days. He was a talented student debater who nevertheless had to be coaxed from shy Highlands boy ‘nursing half a lager’ to self-assured president of Glasgow students union, with a penchant for multiple gin and tonics.
The author is diligently balanced, though, in displaying his knowledge of the internal politics of the Lib Dems – knowledge surely unmatched by many fellow lobby correspondents. Indeed, the book is to a large extent a monograph on the upper echelons of the Alliance parties and then the post-merger Lib Dems, starting from the 23 year-old Kennedy’s unexpected election for the SDP in the Highlands in 1983.
One of the criticisms many levelled at Kennedy, that his leadership lacked direction, fails really to stick in light of this book. The impression is that his mainly centre-left policies, yet avowed independence from Labour (importantly on Iraq) were appropriate for the time, allowing the Lib Dems to pick up votes from both main parties. Anything more would have required a major realignment of the British party system – something Kennedy rightly may have suspected to be out of reach.