Ming Campbell faced the cameras yesterday and I do mean faced. We saw only a talking head, no other camera angle was allowed. We were not permitted even the tiniest peekaboo at his back. I can see why. What man wants to be seen with those knife handles sticking out? It is so undignified to look like a butcher’s block plus, let’s face it, there could be hygiene issues.

It had only been a day since Ming had fled London for Edinburgh. Apparently he flew, although I’m not sure how his back got through the metal detector. At first he claimed that he wanted no publicity but then he realised that he needed publicity to tell his side of the story. A few broadcasters were invited into his lovely Edinburgh home. Because of the one camera angle, we saw little of it: a terracotta wall and a carved white fireplace (detail only). This forced us to concentrate on Ming and his words.

Was this wise? I had always thought that Ming Campbell was a fighter, being an Olympic champion and all that. And yet in this interview he came over as a whinger and a well-rehearsed whinger at that. I watched two versions of this interview, on Sky and the BBC, and he kept trotting out the same phrases. In each he even quoted John Major as having said that “when it was time to leave the stage, leave the stage”. But, yesterday, Ming had not left the stage, he had merely moved it to Edinburgh.

The first thing he wanted us to know was that he had been a huge success as leader of the Lib Dem Backstabbers. He had stabilised the party after the Charles Kennedy knifing incident. He had professionalised the party. He had prepared them for an election in 2007. He glowed as he recounted this. He led from the front (handy and perhaps essential when in the Backstabbers Party).

“The decision to stand down was mine and mine alone,” he claimed, adding that this proved how very decisive he was.

This claim was met with scepticism. What about his Backstabbing Party colleagues? Couldn’t they have been more supportive? What about Simon Hughes and Vince Cable, who both wielded knives, if only tiny paring ones, in recent interviews. They had not, noted Nick Robinson, exactly been saying “Ming must stay!”

“Well,” said Ming, “if senior colleagues had been reported as saying things like that . . .”

Nick Robinson noted gently: “They weren’t reported because that is not what they said.”

Ming looked a bit wounded but refused to dwell. “One or two colleagues said, shall we say, different things.”

Different things? Well that’s one way of putting it. But Ming just wasn’t having it. He had not taken the brave decisive decision to quit because of his backstabbing colleagues. He knew who the guilty party was and none of them was a politician.

It was the media. We have made him “irritated” and “frustrated”. “I am irritated because of the quite extraordinary concentration on trivia, which seems to surround leadership,” he noted, sounding a bit more furious than irritated. “People write articles on what kind of socks I wear!” Sadly, I must report that at that very moment, I really wished the camera angle included his socks and not just his head and shoulders (no tie, by the way).

Indeed, I wrote about his socks once. It was about whether he wore garters. I had no idea that he was so oversensitive.

He was frustrated that the media was obsessed with his age. This despite the fact that he did 18-hour days. “My fitness, my stamina is as good as I would want it to be,” he noted. But the media would not have it. They didn’t care about his fair and green policies, only his age and his socks.

He sounded just like Victor Meldrew or one of those grumpy old men who appear in those programmes about being grumpy old men. Is this really how he wants to be remembered? Still, I’m sure he felt better getting that off his chest (not that we saw it).

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