Go back 11 years, to the Liberal Democrat conference in Southport, with Quentin Letts of the Mail sitting in the front stalls as “the supposed young visionary of British politics stumbled on words, swabbed his forehead with a hanky and sounded frail, at times as brittle as an octogenarian …
“His voice, mottled by ill health, was tired, gritted, a pile of old roadside snow, a shiver in a threadbare coat … The pale-grey backdrop compounded his lack of colour, but there was also a shadow thrown to his right by the lights. There it lurked, a vulture.”
And so on and so forth. No special brickbats for Letts. Other 2004 sketchwriters reached for the same grab-bag of adjectives. But still, amid last week’s great tide of tributes, friends of Charles Kennedy may be allowed one last question: where does journalism stop, and cruelty begin?
