John Prescott, Labour’s deputy prime minister at the time of the Iraq war in 2003, has said that history would be kind to Charles Kennedy after he was “proved to be right on Iraq”.
In a tweet on Tuesday morning Prescott, who voted in favour of the war, said: “So sad to hear of Charles Kennedy’s passing. He proved to be right on Iraq. History will be as kind to him as he was to others. A great loss.”
Kennedy’s opposition to the war, which saw him appear at the massive anti-war rally in Hyde Park in February 2003, was one of two momentous stands the former Liberal Democrat took in his 32-year political career. Both still resonate to this day.
In the second in 2010 Kennedy was one of the few Lib Dem MPs to vote against Nick Clegg’s decision to form a coalition with the Conservatives. He declared that the move drove a “strategic coach and horses” through the ambitions of his political hero and mentor, Roy Jenkins, to realign the centre left.
The two stands taken by Kennedy bookend the most important era in Liberal politics in the modern era and help to explain the catastrophic election defeat suffered by the party last month which cost him his once-safe Highlands seat.
The Lib Dems’ opposition to the Iraq war, which led to much soul-searching by the party and an intense debate about whether it would be appropriate for the leader of Britain’s third party to appear on an anti-war platform, helped lay the ground for a breakthrough in the 2005 general election.
Kennedy, whose health troubles meant that he missed important events during the 2005 campaign, increased the number of Lib Dem MPs by 10 to 62 as the party’s overall national vote rose from 18.3% to 22%.
Kennedy had positioned the Lib Dems as a significant force of protest to the left of New Labour as he abandoned the approach of Paddy Ashdown, who formed a joint cabinet committee with Tony Blair as part of his attempts to realign the centre-left. Kennedy did not regard Blair as a progressive soulmate on the left even though they were elected at the same time in 1983 and shared a joint love of the music of David Bowie.
Kennedy was unable to consolidate his electoral success in 2005 as he fell victim to an internal coup as concerns grew about his alcohol problems. He eventually acknowledged his difficulties and stood down in early 2006.
But his electoral success – following Ashdown’s work in taking the party from appearing as a mere asterisk in opinion polls in the late 1980s to 46 seats in the 1997 general election – laid the ground for the Lib Dems to hold the balance of power when Britain finally elected a hung parliament in 2010. Nick Clegg presided over a fall in the number of MPs in the 2010 election – down from 62 to 57 – but found himself as the kingmaker after David Cameron failed to secure an overall parliamentary majority.
Kennedy once again turned out to be prescient as he warned that a coalition with the Tories was wholly out of tune of the party’s approach, dating back to the era of Jo Grimond in the 1960s, to realign the centre-left.
In an Observer article explaining his decision to vote against the coalition Kennedy wrote of the week’s events: “Certainly, they drive a strategic coach and horses through the long-nurtured ‘realignment of the centre-left’ to which leaders in the Liberal tradition, this one included, have all subscribed since the Jo Grimond era. It is hardly surprising that, for some of us at least, our political compass currently feels confused. And that really encapsulates the reasons why I felt personally unable to vote for this outcome when it was presented to Liberal Democrat parliamentarians.”
As Liberal Democrats pore over their devastating electoral defeat last month, which saw their number of MPs cut from 57 to eight, many wonder whether Clegg made his fatal mistake even before entering the coalition. His mistake, many said, was to fail to deal with the Kennedy legacy and to make clear that he had wholly abandoned the era of protest politics to the left of Labour.
Clegg, a follower of the “Orange Book” tendency of fiscally conservative Lib Dems, hailed from a different tradition to Kennedy, who was a member of the SDP. The former deputy prime minister tried to break with Kennedy by abandoning the party’s opposition to university tuition fees in the runup to the 2010 general election. Supporters of Kennedy blocked this move at the 2009 party conference, forcing Clegg to include it in his manifesto, though he buried it inside.
But when the NUS ran a campaign against tuition fees during the election campaign Clegg happily posed with posters pledging to “vote against any increase in fees”.
It was back to the Kennedy era, prompting Tony Blair to say after the coalition was formed that if a party fights three general elections in a row to the left of Labour and then ends up in coalition with the Tories it was bound to have a problem.
It is no accident that Tim Farron, the frontrunner in the Lib Dem leadership contest who spurned the chance of ministerial office, is placing himself firmly in the Kennedy tradition.
Farron, who tweeted that he was “utterly heartbroken” by the loss of a colleague, friend and mentor, released a document on his values last week in which he pledged to “mount the mother of all fightbacks”.
