It wasn’t the booze: Cameron did for Kennedy, and now Blair is the target

A myth is beginning to be constructed around the events of the last week at Westminster. It needs to be challenged at once before it gains ground and becomes acknowledged fact. It goes as follows: Charles Kennedy was sacked as leader of the Liberal Democrats because he was a heavy drinker. This is open to challenge — both the claim that Kennedy was a heavy drinker, and the associated proposition that he was driven from office on account of his drinking.

Kennedy’s consumption of alcohol was at most moderate — and negligible compared with an earlier generation of politicians: Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Ken Clarke. All of them were the better for it. Melodramatic accounts of Kennedy’s reckless drinking which appeared in the press over the weekend should be treated with a certain amount of suspicion. Readers should bear in mind that these stories have been carefully placed in the public prints by Kennedy’s assassins, desperate to justify their treachery and to cover their tracks.

Kennedy went for a different reason: he had lost the confidence of Liberal Democrat MPs at Westminster. Drink had nothing much to do with it. Kennedy has been ‘boozing’ (i.e., enjoying the odd glass of beer or whisky, and occasionally letting his hair down in private) for years. He would have been allowed to carry on in the same merry vein into the next general election except for just one thing: the sudden emergence of a popular Conservative leader who threatened to reverse the Lib Dem gains of the last decade. David Cameron was Kennedy’s undoing, not secret bingeing.