Charles Kennedy began his political life in another world. It was the Highlands, it was feudal – and it was the SDP. His nomination as SDP candidate in 1982 for what was then Ross and Cromarty was a stitch-up by Bob Maclennan, then the MP for neighbouring Caithness and Sutherland. There was a strong local candidate but he was considered to have too many rough edges to make a good campaigner. Charles was favoured by Bob who, in an area party that grouped members from both Ross and Cromarty and Bob’s own Caithness and Sutherland constituency, whipped his own constituency members into line to ensure Charles secured the nomination.
Ross and Cromarty was then the most volatile seat in the UK, being won on a couple of occasions recently by the party which had previously come last in a three-or four-way contest. So it was a good seat for a buccaneering Highlander like Charles to contest. During the election campaign he would deliver one speech at a village hall in Achiltibuie geared perfectly to the needs of the crofters; and then an hour or so later deliver another in Ullapool focusing on Scotland’s fishing industries.
He was passionate about the Highlands, Scotland, the UK and the need for effective international institutions, notably the European Union (or Common Market, as it then was) and the United Nations. He so energised and enthused his listeners that, though he strongly backed both Nato and the retention of nuclear weapons, local CND members flocked to support him.
And he fought a tough, gruelling personal campaign. He would take his car and park it at the pier where the midnight ferry would carry the night workers over to the fabrication site for the oil rigs at Nigg. He’d canvass them on the ferry. But what won their hearts, and their votes, was that he’d be on the dawn ferry that carried them back after their shift. He’d slept out in his car in a sleeping bag.
He was young, inexperienced, and sometimes quite shy. On one of his first public functions after winning the seat, he was in the Black Isle for a Highland Show. So he wasn’t wearing his VIP rosette when he was heading to the VIP tent. The result: he was stopped by a policeman who told him firmly: “You can’t go in there, sonny, that’s for the grown-ups.”
How do I know this? I’d sought the Ross and Cromarty nomination myself (coming third, if I recall, with four votes). On the day after the election, I was at SDP London headquarters in Cowley Street when the results from rural Scotland were coming in. Suddenly the TV screen showed a vast area turning the relevant colour for the SDP – and nobody else at Cowley Street had the slightest understanding as to why this should be so, let alone who had caused this upset, the sole pure SDP gain at the election.
A day later, I was rung up from Inverness by the local party agent. Did I know anywhere Charles could stay? Charles had only been to London a couple of times before. And so, for six or seven weeks, he was my lodger, setting off for the House of Commons with a hand-drawn map prepared by my wife to guide him to Barons Court station.
