Charles Kennedy yesterday confirmed his secret weapon for the general election.

The Liberal Democrats’ campaign will not revolve around tax cuts or the expulsion of asylum-seekers, but something althogether less reasonable: his newborn baby.

Kennedy Jr, due less than a fortnight before the expected polling date of May 5, will be central to the campaign, the expectant father told Woman’s Hour, on Radio 4.

“What we have decided — and these things are so unpredictable, particularly a first baby — is that priority No 1 will be (my wife) Sarah and the baby, and the election campaign will be structured in such a way as to take account of that.”

Bold trek back from space to Shakespeare

PATRICK STEWART, the actor who will for ever be remembered for his role as a Star Trek commander with a quasi-French name, is attempting to rebuild his career as a serious Shakespearean actor. Jean-Luc Picard — sorry, Stewart — is in talks with the Royal Shakespeare Company to return to the stage in an as yet unnamed project.

The actor, who is currently starring with the American teen poster boy Joshua Hartnett in A Life in the Theatre, told me that he is negotiating a Shakespearean role as well as a lead in a play by the late Arthur Miller.

“I am planning to do some Arthur Miller and some Shakespeare,” he boomed. “I cannot say yet (whether it will be with the RSC), but I am back in London to act.”

Michael Boyd, the RSC’s artistic director, has recently been in talks with the actor, who last performed with the company in 1986 in Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies at the Almeida. His last full season with them was in 1982.

No role has been confirmed, but Trekkies are confident that he could lend the necessary gravitas to Demetrius’s line in Titus Andronicus: “Better than he have worn vulcan’s badge.”

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