Abracadabra! A discreetly retouched Charles Kennedy. Man with the common touch, and with just a touch of common. You only need to look at Kennedy's face, though - shocking pink and flaccid as an omelette - to know that he's not really changed.
The idea that he didn't take his politics seriously was best illustrated by a shocking front-page Sun story revealing how he had won £2,000 after placing a £50 bet that the Lib Dems would only win two seats in Europe in 1994. Soon after, Kennedy completed his term as president and a couple of years ago was made responsible for rural affairs - a post with little visibility and less prestige.
Which is where Kennedy remains. But next week the voting forms go out to the 90,000 Lib Dem members to find the successor to Paddy Ashdown , and Kennedy is almost certain to win. More than half the 46 Lib Dem MPs have announced that they will back him, and the party's favourite thinker Menzies Campbell has dropped out to ease Kennedy's way.
We are sitting on the terrace of the National Liberal Club, soaked by the sun. London's traffic is a friendly background buzz, and the lagers are once again within supping distance. Kennedy says he is enjoying the hustings and launches into the first of many anecdotes. The other day the leadership candidates were asked what they had changed their mind about most over the past 10 years. 'It was one of those questions you're not going to win on and you could lose badly if you don't answer carefully, so my answer was 'Well 10 years ago I had my 30th birthday party, so by definition this year you can guess that the big 4-0 is approaching, and one thing I've fundamentally changed my mind about is that 10 years ago I thought 40 was ancient and now I realise I was completely wrong.' Eheheheh!'
Good answer, I say. 'Enough to get you out of a potentially tricky situation,' Kennedy adds, still laughing. But I can't help thinking the questioner has been short-changed that such a glib response is insulting. What would the true answer be? He sets off on another extended anecdote and then another...
I remind him I'm still waiting for the real answer. 'It wasn't deliberate,' he says apologetically, 'I was just gossiping.' Eventually he tells me he wishes he hadn't supported the way the Child Support Agency had been set up, and he should have taken urban environmental concerns a little more seriously, but coming from the West Highlands of Scotland you take clean air for granted. Good consensual issues. He won't make enemies over those confessions.
It's a fascinating time for the Lib Dems. As Labour swamps the centre ground of British politics, the Liberal Democrats rail against social injustice: the stripping of benefits for asylum seekers, single parents, the disabled the joke that is public transport, Blair's dubious patronage of celebrity. And Kennedy says that there is more dissent on the way: 'Over the next two years, as people's minds focus on the next Westminster election, they're going to be talking less about collaboration and more about competition.'
He says there's a good deal that Labour should be praised for (notably the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly) before advancing to his pet hate. 'Politics is becoming so soundbitten and airbrushed. Wit as a parliamentary weapon is not being used nearly enough nowadays.'
Kennedy is regularly called a bon viveur, a charmer and a wit. As he knows, it's not always a compliment. 'If people want to be negative about you, I suppose they're going to say it's all a bit fluffy, that you lead a slightly charmed existence.'
The critics have also named him Inaction Man in contrast to Ashdown. How harmful has this been? 'Let me reach for a cigarette first of all in defiant response to that.' He claims not to be bothered, but it hurts enough for him to tell me he represents the country's biggest geographical constituency and that he's always had to battle hard to hold his seat.
'If it was a serious reputation I don't think half the MPs in this party would be supporting me. I doubt they'd say Inaction Man is the guy to deliver me a second term, you know.'
Not surprisingly, Action Man and Inaction Man are supposed to have fallen out. Did Ashdown sideline him with rural brief? 'It's a job I asked to do after the last election,' Kennedy insists. He says he was offered a more glamorous post in foreign affairs, but he felt the real work was to be done in rural areas where the Liberals won the bulk of their seats at the last election. He says Ashdown has been brilliant, absolutely brilliant, at a time when the military approach was essential to keep the party alive, but he hopes he will be more collegiate.
Didn't Ashdown criticise him for all the appearances on quiz shows when he could have been working? 'It's not true. He said he thinks it's very important that people like me show the Lib Dems are not just a one-man band.' That they are a two-man band? 'No. No. That we've got other recognisable faces that are not just appearing on the Newsnights and Question Times of this world, important though they are. But appearing in other guises. If it's a good news day on Newsnight you'll get a million people on an average weekend over the two editions of Have I Got News For You you get nine million.'
What turned him towards politics? 'First, there was just a burning interest and passion.' There is little sense of fire in the belly, though. His father was a crofter and draughtsman and Kennedy says that throughout childhood he had a sense of remoteness, apartness. But it seems as much a hankering for decent TV reception as a desperate sense of political isolation. 'There was no colour TV, I knew what Blue Peter was but didn't know what Magpie was because we didn't get ITV.'
I ask again what politicised him, and he talks about the school debating society. There is a story I've always presumed was apocryphal that Kennedy moved away from the Labour Party because it was against competitive debating. 'Yes. Yes that's right,' he says with a nostalgic grin. 'At Glasgow University they didn't participate in the student debates 'cos it was considered bourgeois, middle class.'
What does he consider his strengths as a politician? 'I think you've got to like people. There are MPs who are either painfully shy or who don't like public speaking or don't socialise very well, and you just think this must be the worst job in the world for them.'
He says he believes few people are turning out for elections because politics is failing to connect with people. 'I think that's because there are not enough people in politics who are actually normal members of the human race. If that is the charge against me, I'm happy to plead guilty.'
He's right. It is his strength. But, as leader of the Lib Dems, it may well prove to be his weakness. In being so normal, the nice guy who likes a chat and a beer and who suffers his fair share of surplus chins, is also utterly unremarkable. His reason for challenging for the leadership is predictably uninspiring. 'Politics is about time and chance and you've just got to take the opportunity when it comes to you.'
There is something endearing about Charles Kennedy when he's not trying to be the clever, evasive politician. I ask him what his greatest regret is, and without hesitation he mentions the bet in the Euro-elections. He replays it in slow-motion, squirming over the details. I say I was shocked when I read about it, that it reminded me of stories of goalkeepers who had allegedly bet against their own team.
'No. I wasn't betting against the party. It was in line with what I'd publicly predicted. Looking back it's funny now, but it was embarrassing at the time. If I could change one walk with destiny, I wouldn't walk to the bookies on that particular occasion. You live and learn.'
On the way out I ask him what the result is going to be in the leadership election. He says he's had it with forecasting. Meanwhile, he and the photographer are negotiating picture opportunities. Next to a statue of Gladstone? 'Too pretentious.' Next to Lloyd George? 'Too many negative associations.' With his jacket draped round his shoulders? 'Too Paddyesque... What you should have is a picture of me sound asleep on the steps, that would suit the image, with a fag in my hand, sunglasses, an empty bottle of wine. Comatose.'
