CLUTCHING his preferred campaign tipple, a Diet Coke, Charles Kennedy had reason to feel satisfied with the past few weeks.
Without counting votes before they were cast, he could be reasonably assured that his party would have more MPs in the next Parliament — and there was already one more member, Donald, in the Kennedy household, and his impact on the candidate’s sleeping patterns had been one of the constants of a grinding campaign. “I started exhausted and slowly got up the energy levels as it has gone on,” he said.
In the garden of the party’s Cowley Street headquarters in Westminster, the talk was of besting the Tories and Labour, but much of the action was aimed at fending off the early-evening mosquitoes, clearly non-partisan in selecting their candidates. To the average mosquito, Mr Kennedy must have seemed a healthy specimen and he admitted that he had been taking multivitamins to bolster his constitution.
The question for the Lib Dems and Mr Kennedy was whether they themselves were dietary supplement or main meal. He conceded that there was electoral benefit to being a little ambiguous but he intended to clarify the party’s character after the election. “I think, inevitably, any opposition party — well, maybe, it’s not happening for the Conservative Party — but opposition parties undoubtedly benefit from people who are fed up with incumbents at whatever level. And we are no different. The issue is, if people come to you on the basis of registering a protest, can you convert them into something positive?”
But was he not echoing Michael Howard’s slogan about “sending a message to Tony Blair”? Mr Kennedy vehemently denied this. “That strategy has been tried in elections gone by and has not got a very happy antecedence. Clearly, there is not enthusiasm for Labour being returned with yet another thumping three-figure majority. There is a view that you need an effective alternative to Labour. That is clearly not coming from the Conservatives. Therefore, what do you do? Well, Liberal Democrats are at least making a fist of this election, fighting it positively, trying to stick to what they see as the priorities and talking about them.”
The Lib Dems had at times looked like a catch-all opposition, gathering highprofile backers where they could, from Greg Dyke, the former BBC Director-General; to the agony aunt Claire Rayner and even Brian Sedgemore, the hard-left former Labour MP who has attacked everything Mr Kennedy stood for in the SDP and now the Lib Dems.
For a moment, Mr Kennedy looked embarrassed when we asked what the late Roy Jenkins, his mentor, would have thought of his embrace of Mr Sedgemore. “If you look at the reasons that Brian (Sedgemore) has given, Roy would not have disagreed for one moment with his pro-Europeanism. He would not have disagreed with his emphasis on civil liberties. Although Roy had passed away (in January 2003, two months before the Iraq war), I find it almost inconceivable that he would now be in a position where he would have said Blair was right on Iraq. He would probably have said to himself: ‘It is a funny old world.’ But time moves on.”
Mr Kennedy acknowledged the importance of Iraq but claimed that the Lib Dems had a broader appeal. “Looking back at past campaigns, we have done reasonably well in establishing credentials on one or two things but not much more than that, like the penny on income tax for education. But if we are going to be more central players, we had to be part of the debate on a bigger variety of things: from school class sizes to the replacement of council tax by local income tax. I think we have had the self-confidence to put something out there that is not just a sticking-plaster approach of the type that the other two are offering.
“We also knew the Iraq issue was one we wanted to stress a lot, but at the end. My view was that, if we had started on Iraq, then a lot of people would have said that is all we wanted to talk about. Now, in the closing stage, it is a matter of saying to people, don’t be taken in by any of this rubbish, this ‘if you go to bed with Charles Kennedy, you wake up with Michael Howard’ . . . that is just for the birds.”
Who do you wake up with then? “You wake up with more Charles Kennedys,” replied the proud father.
Mr Kennedy denied that his proposals for a 50p top-rate of income tax, state funding of care for the elderly, higher pensions and no tuition fees put the Lib Dems on the Left.
We suggested that people in Hampshire would not vote for the party if they thought that higher income taxes would follow. Mr Kennedy argued that successes in these areas were not just “flash-in-the-pan by-election wins, these have been sustained”.
He emphasised a broader social justice appeal. “There is an innate sense of fair play about this country. People have a genuine conviction that there is not sufficient fairness after eight years of a Labour Government. Why is it that the bottom section of earners are paying a higher proportion in tax of their income than probably the top end? I think people recognise that if you want decent public services and you don’t want things like university top-up fees, that comes with a price tag attached.”
Mr Kennedy sounded defensive when we pointed out that Lib Dem proposals for universal provision benefited the middle classes more than Labour’s more selective approach. “Why should there be something unethical about trying to be helpful to people who happen to be middle class? You have got to remember that this is an aspiring and aspirant society. There are a lot of people who want to be middle class, who in income terms may not be there yet, so why shouldn’t we have policies that help them?”
Yet did the Lib Dem approach not imply higher levels of public spending and taxation in the long term? Mr Kennedy retreated behind the careful costings produced by Vince Cable, his Treasury spokesman, and turned to words such as “feasible, credible, capable of delivery”.
There is an unresolved debate in the Lib Dems between reformers urging a more free market and consumerist approach and those defending existing public sector structures. Mr Kennedy accepted that after the election, whatever the outcome, “we are going to have to get more rigorous yet. That is why I have already set in train an internal review of policy in certain areas, such as the environmental agenda.”
He saw a real democratic problem in the possibility that what he called the two older parties may get a lower percentage of the vote together than at any time since the 1920s. This became “a bigger and bigger issue about the legitimacy of the mandate, when you might have anything up to two thirds, three quarters of the people not having actively endorsed what you want to do”.
Mr Kennedy has spent most of his six-year leadership distancing his party from Labour. Would this change under Gordon Brown? Mr Kennedy was not sure. “Gordon has just said he would have done everything exactly the same as Tony did over the war. So it seems to me that criticism that applies to one would equally apply to the other.”
He talked confidently about his plans. “If the perception is that the Liberal Democrats continue on an upward curve under my leadership, then obviously you have got a more credible platform than you had the Parliament before. So if we come out with an enhanced position at this election in terms of votes and seats, you will be starting from a higher threshold, so you have to raise your own game as well.
“I look back at my formative influences. It seems bizarre now, but when the SDP was launched, it was mocked by its opponents for a whole manner of things, including the fact that you could join it using your credit card. That seems absurd now.”
But, we suggested, look at the mountain of credit-card debt now? That was one problem Mr Kennedy would happily take on.
