‘I’m going to take my tie half-off,’ Sir Menzies Campbell announces. ‘Feel free to do so.’ It is a sweltering afternoon in his office, and there is no etiquette governing how men should strip off in such circumstances. I lower my tie knot an inch or so. He takes off his jacket. I follow suit. ‘There’s nothing I can take off,’ pipes up his press officer, sitting beside me in a dress. Sir Menzies blushes, stutters and moves straight on to the subject: his relaunch as leader of the Liberal Democrats.
He would bridle at this description, but this in effect is what is underway. Elected in March as a man of stature who would stop David Cameron’s advance, Sir Menzies appeared to lose his grip almost immediately, fluffing his lines at Prime Minister’s Questions. His old enemies muttered darkly about ousting him at the next party conference. Charles Kennedy pointedly refused to rule out a comeback.
Now Sir Menzies is fighting back. He’s brushed up his Commons performance and has learnt how to remove his spectacles and jab them at the Prime Minister. He is scoring hits on foreign policy. At the end of June the Lib Dems almost defeated the Conservatives in the Bromley & Chislehurst by-election, the 17th safest Tory seat in Britain. To Sir Menzies, this is the start of a yellow offensive against the Tories.
‘I’m pretty relaxed about Cameron coming on to our ground. We staked it out a long time ago and if he wants a fight in it, fine. It’s ours, we know it,’ he says. His voters will see the Conservative leader as a fraud. ‘Where are David Cameron’s convictions? He wrote the last Tory manifesto, a document 100 miles away from where he is today. He has not travelled an ideological journey, as Thatcher did.
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