It must have been about five years ago, at a reception at the reptile house of the London zoo, when I met Charles Kennedy. We hit it off immediately. We were joking about how weird it was to eat asparagus next to stick insects, and I was struck, as we chatted, by his wit. When he arrived, he had that look he sometimes had, like he’d woken up out of a bad dream – eyes that were open and yet slightly lost. But he relaxed and was great fun.
The evening wore on and he had to go and so did I. It must have been winter because it was completely pitch black, and on the way out we missed the exit signs and somehow lost our way in the zoo. There was something rather surreal about it.
We ended up in the aardvark enclosure. Aardvarks are nocturnal animals so they were wide awake and as startled to see us as we were to see them. We desperately tried to read what it said about them, but by now we were in fits of laughter. It said the aardvark was nocturnal, very quick to sniff food and avoided rocky terrain. And Charles said that sounded like a lot of MPs he knew.
Eventually, we found our way out and went our separate ways. I think we dropped each other a couple of notes afterwards about what a fun evening it was and we hoped that our paths would cross again but they never did.
In that moment he struck me as someone who was a performer, who liked to be in the limelight, but was a little bit scared that the light might make you see him. Somebody once said about Kenneth Williams that he was desperate to be looked at, but terrified of being seen. And there was something of that about Charles that evening.
He was hugely fun, witty, courteous with his convictions, polite with his politics. Very firm in his views but not tribal. He spoke a bit about Iraq and how he had felt obliged to speak his mind on it, which at that time, wasn’t a particularly popular thing to do in certain circles.
His death is a great loss to British politics at a time when liberalism needs bringing home again. Martin Luther King never said “I have a nightmare” and likewise Charles’ desire for justice was always impressively built on hope not jaundice.
It was certainly a memorable evening for me. It’s not every day you meet an MP and aardvark in a zoo at night.
