To commemorate the sad death of Menzies Campbell, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, on 26 September 2025, we are reprinting here the chapter on him from our book British Liberal Leaders (Biteback, 2015).
Sir Menzies Campbell
Greg Simpson
Menzies Campbell, commonly known as ‘Ming’, came late to leadership of the Liberal Democrats. Aged sixty-four, on 2 March 2006, Campbell was elected leader of a party in the aftermath the revelations of Charles Kennedy’s personal problems and his removal as leader. Campbell succeeded in steadying the ship; his professional approach enabled the party to be ready for an early election anticipated when Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as Prime Minister. On 5 October 2007, however, Brown ruled out an early election, and within ten days, Campbell had resigned as Liberal Democrat leader after just nineteen months in charge. Despite the progress he had made internally, Campbell’s lawyerly style, his old-fashioned image, and his statesman-like approach had limited his ability to connect with the public. His background as a foreign affairs spokesman ill-equipped him to deal with the demands of the complex domestic agenda. Judging that he would struggle to convert a caretaker’s stint as leader into a longer term haul through to the end of the Parliament, Campbell stood aside.
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Walter Menzies Campbell, born Kelvin Bridge, Glasgow 22 May 1941.
Son of George Campbell – joiner who finished his career as General Manager of the Glasgow Corporation Building’s Department – and Elizabeth – post office clerk – with one sister (Fiona).
Educated locally, trained as a solicitor.
Married Lady Elspeth Grant Suttie (née Urquhart) in 1970; one son James from Elspeth’s previous marriage.
Elected as Liberal MP for North East Fife in 1987; held the seat until stepping down in 2015.
Queens Counsel 1982, knighthood 2003, leader of the Liberal Democrats 2 March 2006–15 October 2007.
Chancellor St Andrews University 2006. incumbent.
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Born in 1941, Campbell’s childhood in a rented Glasgow tenement was ‘comfortable and commonplace for the standards of the time’.[1] The young Campbell was an accomplished sprinter, representing Great Britain at the 1964 Olympics while studying law at Glasgow University. A contemporary of John Smith and Donald Dewar, Campbell could count future luminaries of the Labour Party among his personal friends, but he rejected the industrial socialism of Scottish Labour and the iron grip it held in the West of Scotland. Captured in his teens by the radical, puckish enthusiasm of Jo Grimond, Campbell was an independent minded Liberal. He served as the president of the Glasgow University Liberal Club, and, in the same year that he competed in the Olympics, was president of the union.
After graduation Campbell pursued the law with the same determination that he had shown on the track. He was called to the Scottish Bar in 1968, with ambitions to become a Scottish Supreme Court judge.
Encouraged by David Steel, Campbell also became an active member of the Scottish Liberals. He stood in Greenock and Port Glasgow in both general elections in 1974 and chaired the Scottish Liberal Party in 1975. He fought East Fife for the Liberals in both 1979 and North East Fife in 1983. He considered himself, however, a lawyer first and a politician second, becoming a Queen’s Counsel in 1982. In 1987, he stood again for North East Fife but only after striking a deal with Steel that if successful he could continue his legal practice while an MP. At the age of forty-six, he was elected to Parliament with a majority of 1,447.
Under Steel and Ashdown Campbell was given briefs that played to his professional strengths while allowing time for his legal pursuits: spokesperson for arts, broadcasting and sport, and shadowing the Lord Advocate and solicitor general for Scotland. After the 1992 election, however, he requested and was given the defence brief, keen to avoid being pigeon-holed as a Scot, a lawyer or an athlete.
He was to become an established part of Paddy Ashdown’s inner circle, seeing Ashdown’s ‘project’ to foster close relations with Labour as an extension of his Liberal hero Jo Grimond’s aim of a realignment of the progressive left. Enthused by the possibilities this could bring, including a possible Cabinet seat, and on the advice of his political mentor Roy Jenkins, Campbell turned down the offer of a judgeship in 1996 to concentrate on politics.
He was considered by many as a contender to succeed Ashdown, but did not stand for leader in 1999. He saw no possibility of gaining enough support to challenge Charles Kennedy successfully, and consequently threw his weight behind the front-runner. With a younger man from a different political generation now at the helm, Campbell’s own ambitions to lead the Liberal Democrats seemed at an end. He stood unsuccessfully for Speaker of the House in 2000, and considered retiring from politics to pursue his legal ambitions.
The next parliament, however, rejuvenated Campbell’s political career. As Liberal Democrat shadow Foreign Secretary, he played a major role in setting the party’s direction after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Campbell’s ardent defence of international law provided the intellectual underpinning for the Liberal Democrat opposition to UK involvement in toppling Saddam Hussein. Despite undergoing treatment for cancer at the time, Campbell became a regular face in the media arguing with all the force of his legal training that the case for war had not been made. In February 2003, he was elected Liberal Democrat deputy leader by his fellow MPs. The role gave him first-hand experience of Kennedy’s personal difficulties, as he was asked on more than one occasion to stand in at short notice when Kennedy was incapacitated.
Campbell was not a central part of the circle of MPs who ultimately pushed Kennedy out, but he understood that he was their choice to take over. Having seen the enormous pressure and impact of leadership on the three previous incumbents, Campbell no longer craved the burden, but with the relative immaturity of some other potential candidates, and the difficult task ahead of reuniting the parliamentary party, Campbell considered himself best placed to lead in the circumstances. It was duty more than residual ambition that ultimately led him to stand, and he declared on the same day Kennedy resigned.
Many of the advantages which had propelled the Liberal Democrats to their best ever showing in the general election of 2005 had dissipated. Increasingly seen by the media as ideologically incoherent and directionless, and with the salience of Iraq as a political issue rapidly diminishing, by January 2006 the party’s poll rating had fallen to an average of16 per cent.[2] With a resurgent Conservative Party under David Cameron pitching for Liberal Democrat voters, and with the prospect of the Labour government renewing itself in power as Tony Blair’s premiership came to an end, whoever took over from Kennedy faced a squeeze from both left and the right.
Campbell’s leadership pitch was to be ‘captain and coach’ and ‘a bridge to the future’[3] – a safe pair of hands to steady the ship and shore up support. From the off, this laid Campbell open to being seen as a caretaker leader in the mould of the Conservative Michael Howard – taking over the party after a leadership resignation, steering it through the rough patch and fighting a quick election before handing over. Although a Howard-style coronation was not on the cards, the wide support Campbell received from the parliamentary party suggests that his pitch had been tacitly agreed. He was elected leader on 2 March 2006 by a comfortable margin, beating Simon Hughes and Chris Huhne by winning 45 per cent of the vote in the first round and 58 per cent in the final round.
Campbell’s immediate challenge was to stabilise the party after disruption of the previous six months and to provide a sense of direction and momentum. He was determined that there should be no return to the bunker mentality of the leader’s office under Kennedy – nor his laid-back approach to policy-making. He promoted some of the new generation of MPs to spokespeople positions, embraced the party organisation, professionalising meeting structures and chairing meetings effectively. He set in train a streamlining of the policy-making process to make it more responsive to external events. He moved to hold party HQ – in particular the fundraising operation – more closely to account after it emerged that a high-profile donor, Michael Brown, had acted fraudulently. Overall, he sought to impose a sense of purpose – getting the house in order for a possible snap election after Blair stood down.
After the 2005 election the party had begun a thorough policy review. Kennedy had signalled that he expected it to tackle some of the positions that had been considered to have held the party back, such as the commitment to raise the top tax rate, but had given little direction beyond that. Campbell, no expert outside the areas of foreign affairs and defence, was a pragmatist, not an ideologue. He did not dictate policy solutions, but empowered those driving the process to construct an agenda that was overtly of the liberal centre-left, promoting social opportunity, protecting civil liberties, adopting the green agenda and, crucially, finding methods of redistribution that were not perceived as hostile to aspiration.
He threw the weight of the leadership firmly behind the conclusions. At the 2006 autumn conference, the commitment to a higher top rate of tax was dropped in favour of a new package that was in fact more redistributive. In the spring 2007 conference, he took the unusual step, for a leader, of intervening in a debate over the UK’s nuclear deterrent, successfully seeing off a proposal for the immediate scrapping of the Trident nuclear missile system. In his conferences as leader, Campbell never lost a vote or had a policy foisted on him where the leadership had expressed a preference.
By mid 2007, Campbell had largely fulfilled the terms of his leadership pitch. He had recovered the Liberal Democrat position to a point of competitiveness. Poll ratings had stabilised at an average of 18 per cent under his leadership, a respectable level at mid-term in the Parliament.[4] The party organisation was in good shape to fight an election, with finance, a campaign plan and key personnel all in place and ready.
The election manifesto was approved immediately after the September conference. Entitled Choose a Fairer and Greener Britain, it represented significant progress from the 2005 platform, including the new tax policy package, a commitment to a zero-carbon Britain by 2050, a pupil premium to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and a new maternity income guarantee for first-time parents, alongside familiar policy positions such as local income tax and scrapping tuition fees.
With his confidence boosted by an ICM poll that showed Liberal Democrat support at 20 per cent, Campbell’s speech at the 2007 autumn conference was his best: a coherent annunciation of the new policy platform and an impassioned argument for the defence of civil liberties and opportunity.[5] He left the conference in no doubt about how he had positioned the party against David Cameron’s ‘broken society’ Conservatism and Gordon Brown’s ‘clunking fist’ Labour Party. ‘I’m a politician in the centre-left, I joined a centre-left party, I’m leading a centre-left party, I make no secret of that,’ he told Michael White of the Guardian. ‘I think the real divide is between not so much left and right but from liberal and authoritarian. And we are the anti-authoritarian party.’[6]
By this point, however, Campbell was no longer the master of his own fate. In the words of BBC political correspondent Nick Robinson: ‘There was no plot this week to unseat Sir Menzies Campbell, but there were mutterings. This speech should stop them – for now’.[7] So why was Campbell’s leadership in trouble?
While he had indeed proved an effective ‘chairman’ and ‘bridge to the future’, he had struggled to build a charismatic image outside the party – a key part of the role of ‘captain’. Campbell saw politics as a civilised competition of ideas, in which the best contestants were sincere and honest, not to be despised but admired for their strength of argument or position. Although Campbell could play rough on his home patch, given the choice he would play the ball, never the person. Indeed, in the Commons, he would go out of his way to find opportunities to apologise publicly to those whom he felt he slighted unfairly. As foreign affairs spokesman, he had cultivated the persona of an objective commentator. This suited his respect for intellectual argument but ill-served him as leader, and he initially struggled at Prime Minister’s questions. ‘It’s theatre, not debate. I’m uncomfortable with that type of politics and it showed,’ he later reflected.[8] His natural tendency towards caution and reflection could give the impression of flat-footedness.
Campbell political career had been built around too narrow a front to step into the glaring sunlight as a new party leader. While he was able to take a brief and emote on principles, he was relatively unfamiliar with the complexities of education, health, and local government. As a Scottish MP, he often had no reserves to fall back on where the Scottish experience was markedly different from that of other parts of the UK. He could not instinctively recognise where the Liberal Democrats could occupy unique political space on domestic issues, as he had always been able to do on international ones.
Campbell governed in prose, but could not find the poetry to campaign in the rough-and-tumble world of political leadership. As Andrew Rawnsley put it:
‘Sir Menzies, elected on the basis that a steady pair of hands was the best replacement for a shaky pair of hands, has struggled to make an impact with the public … In the top job, he has seemed ill at ease and unsure of himself … he has been wounded by polls suggesting that voters still preferred Kennedy drunk to Campbell sober … He likes to think of himself as a statesman. He needs to remember that a leader also has to be a salesman.’[9]
He worked hard at his communications style and was getting much better by the end of his leadership, but by then it was too late. In the media, he was lampooned cruelly for his age. The political press lobby jumped on every small reverse, weak poll rating or loose comments from Liberal Democrat MPs or Lords. From the off, he faced systematic negative briefing from within the party. Some who had supported Chris Huhne’s leadership bid saw an interest in ensuring that Campbell’s leadership did not progress beyond that of a caretaker. He was forced into defending his leadership time and again, making it more difficult to concentrate on promoting Liberal Democrat policy and values outside the party.
His leadership also suffered from the limited ambitions he had set. Since the problems were short term, his plan was short term; there was no overarching project beyond that. During the leadership campaign, David Laws MP had written a ‘200 days’ paper of suggested initiatives, but this was filleted by the party’s communications function into a dry strategy that focussed on process rather than headline-grabbing announcements. His team of advisors were not deft enough to provide a platform for him that he could naturally embody and build into a coherent political narrative.
In the local elections in May 2007, the Liberal Democrats lost 246 councillors, bringing to an end several years of steady gains. The UK-wide vote share of 26 per cent was solid, but Campbell and his team had failed to manage media expectations, and the result looked bad. In Scotland, a major advance by the SNP brought the Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition to an end, adding to a growing impression that the party was losing ground.
To compound Campbell’s difficulties, Gordon Brown’s elevation to Prime Minister in June gave Labour a boost in the polls, up by 10 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats falling to an average of 15 per cent, or even lower in some polls.[10] By the end of July Campbell was faced with a delegation of senior peers, including three former party presidents, who urged him to consider his position. Though there was no overt plotting among MPs, the question of his leadership was on their lips.
In the end it was Brown’s decision to rule out an early election that finished Campbell’s leadership. The Parliament would now probably run the full five years to May 2010, at which point Campbell would have been sixty-nine. He judged that he would not be able to ‘trade his way’ out of the position he faced, converting a caretaker stint into a longer term haul; questions about his leadership would be a constant distraction. He had fulfilled his role, steadying the party after Kennedy’s fall. On 15 October 2007, gracefully, and on his own terms, Menzies Campbell exited the stage.
At the general election of May 2015, after serving twenty-eight years as MP for North East Fife, Menzies Campbell retired from the House of Commons. In Parliament he will be remembered as a courteous but forensic debater, who readily made friends across party divides but gave no quarter in political argument. Most of all he will be remembered for his principled defence of international law in opposing war in Iraq in 2003. Campbell was fighting cancer at the time; if there was ever a case of putting country before self, this must count.
For Liberal Democrats, Campbell commands respect and admiration. In his early years in Parliament, his professionalism and credibility helped the Liberals overcome their amateur beard-and-sandals image. As leader, he provided much-needed stability at a crucial point after the toppling of Kennedy, and, with impeccable judgement and timing, did not overstay his welcome.
For Campbell himself, his experience as leader will have been bitter-sweet. He can point to considerable success in his management of the party and election preparations, but the mauling he received at times from the hands of the press, even for a seasoned veteran, must have been difficult for such a proud man. For a former Olympic athlete, the ambition to succeed and reach to top of his profession must have played some part in his decision to stand as leader. But just as it was his sense of duty to the party that led him to Parliament in the first place, so it was with a sense of duty that he assumed the leadership. That duty, surely, was fulfilled.
[1] My Autobigraphy, Menzies Campbell, p. 18.
[2] Author’s research based on monthly averages of UK Polling Report 2005–2010 archive.
[3] Leadership Campaign Launch Speech, 19 Jan 2006.
[4] Author’s research based on monthly averages of UK Polling Report 2005–2010 archive.
[5] http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=65.
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/sep/20/uk.libdem2007.
[7] http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2007/09/blog-reactions-.html.
[8] My Autobiography, Menzies Campbell, p. 258.
[9] Andrew Rawnsley, ‘Burst out of the pinstripes and show us some passion’, Observer 17 Sept 2006.
[10] Author’s research based on monthly averages of UK Polling Report 2005–2010 archive.