{"id":205014,"date":"2025-09-26T15:06:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T15:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/26\/lord-campbell-of-pittenweem-obituary\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T15:06:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T15:06:00","slug":"lord-campbell-of-pittenweem-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/26\/lord-campbell-of-pittenweem-obituary\/","title":{"rendered":"Lord Campbell of Pittenweem obituary"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The veteran Liberal Democrat politician Menzies Campbell<\/a>, who has died aged 84, was briefly the party\u2019s leader for 19 months from March 2006, before falling prey to a whispering campaign by colleagues claiming he was too old, at 66, for the job. Not too old, however, to serve another eight years as an MP.<\/p>\n

Even at that age, Campbell could probably have outpaced most of his younger critics, having been a world-class sprinter in his youth and captain of the Great Britain athletics team. Closer to the truth was that he was not particularly happy or comfortable as a party leader: in an earlier era his sagacity and expertise would probably have been revered and respected but Gordon Brown, then the Labour prime minister, was a decade younger than he was, and the Tories had just elected David Cameron, who was a quarter century younger. Campbell gave way gracefully to be succeeded by Nick Clegg<\/a>, nearly 26 years his junior, who at that time had been in parliament for little more than two years.<\/p>\n

Campbell was universally known as Ming. For a name whose sound approximated to \u201cMingis\u201d, ancient printers lacked the necessary Scots and Middle English letter \u201cyogh\u201d, like a numeral 3<\/a>, in their fonts, so substituted a Z for it, to give Menzies.<\/p>\n

A tall, patrician Scottish figure, he had a fastidious mind and a lawyerly rectitude and reserve. He was the son of George Campbell, who had started his career as a joiner and ended up as general manager of Glasgow<\/a> Corporation\u2019s building department in charge of a workforce of 6,000, and his wife Betty (nee Phillips), whom George had met when she sold him stamps in a post office.<\/p>\n

The family lived in a Glasgow tenement, but were ambitious for their son<\/a>. Campbell once told an interviewer: \u201cThey both came out of the craftsmen class. They both got into the managerial class and what they really wanted was for their son to join the professional class.\u201d He thought that his father would have preferred him to have become a judge rather than a politician.<\/p>\n

Campbell was educated at Hillhead high school in the city\u2019s most prosperous suburb, where he was known as a sportsman: captain of rugby, vice-captain of cricket and a runner, encouraged by his mother, who had herself been a keen hockey player. After school he moved across the road to Glasgow University, where he gained an MA (1962) and an LLB (1965), became president of the university Liberal Club and the university students\u2019 union (like his predecessor as party leader Charles Kennedy<\/a>, who held the office nearly 20 years later).<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Menzies Campbell winning the 1964 AAA athletics championships in London whie he was a Glasgow University law student. <\/span> Photograph: PA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He also became lifelong friends with two other sharp young law students and political activists, John Smith<\/a> and Donald Dewar<\/a>, whose careers would be in the Labour party, into which they unsuccessfully sought to entice Campbell. The future lord chancellor Derry Irvine<\/a> was also a contemporary. All were members of the university dialectic society<\/a>, the debating organisation, and together they formed a sort of bourgeois Scottish political aristocracy, which took all of them ultimately to Westminster: Irvine to the Lords, Smith to the leadership of the Labour party and Dewar to secretary of state for Scotland before becoming the initial first minister for Scotland.<\/p>\n

After studying international law at Stanford University, California, Campbell proceeded in 1968 to the Scottish bar where, as an advocate and later QC, he would specialise in planning law, and his athletics career ran parallel. He was seriously fast. As an undergraduate, he broke a Scottish 300-yards sprint record \u2013 his time stood for 53 years \u2013 and he went on to be part of the British team at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, running in the 200m and 4x100m relay without winning a medal. He subsequently captained the Scotland team at the Empire and Commonwealth Games in Jamaica in 1966 and captained the British athletics team<\/a> in 1965-66. Campbell held the British 100m record from 1967 to 1974.<\/p>\n

He was also active in Scottish Liberal politics \u2013 becoming chairman of the party there in 1975 \u2013 but made his career as a lawyer while standing unsuccessfully for parliament. Ultimately, he nursed his candidacy for the North East Fife seat, the constituency that includes St Andrews and its university, and was finally elected as MP for the seat at the third attempt, in the 1987 general election, holding it until retiring in 2015.<\/p>\n

In the Commons, he became the third party\u2019s defence and foreign affairs spokesman, gaining respect for his expertise and calm, unflustered approach. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, another clever Scottish lawyer and former Tory foreign secretary, wrote in the Observer that Campbell was authoritative and wise: \u201cOne could be forgiven for forgetting that he was not an ex-foreign secretary.\u201d His qualities came to the fore in the party\u2019s principled decision to oppose the Iraq war in 2003.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Campbell celebrating with his wife, Elspeth, and party members after winning the Liberal Democrat leadership contest in 2006. <\/span> Photograph: Ray Tang\/Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Characteristically, Campbell grounded his opposition in a forensic dismantling of the Blair government\u2019s shiftiness over the legality of the invasion and the restrained, but pointed, questioning of whether the supposedly special relationship with the US really required Britain slavishly to follow the policy decisions of the Bush administration in Washington.<\/p>\n

\u201cA relationship with the United States based on the flawed principle \u2018my ally right or wrong\u2019 is not only profoundly illiberal but will be unsustainable as well,\u201d he argued presciently but unavailingly.<\/p>\n

Campbell had not run for the leadership of the party when Paddy Ashdown stood down in 1999 \u2013 it was doubtful whether he would have won the vote of party members against the charismatic but more lightweight Charles Kennedy \u2013 but he did attempt to become Commons speaker in 2000, when he stood little chance against the Scottish Old Labour machine politician Michael Martin.<\/p>\n

In 2002 he underwent prolonged chemotherapy treatment for cancer \u2013 non-Hodgkin lymphoma \u2013 which took him out of parliament for a period and aged him. But he returned the following year and, as the senior Lib Dem, became deputy leader of the party to an increasingly erratic Kennedy, who was undergoing his own health problems with alcoholism. In Kennedy\u2019s intermittent absences, Campbell exuded a mature gravitas and restraint, but following the 2005 election, which produced the party\u2019s most successful performance in 80 years, within months the leader\u2019s shortcomings could no longer be hidden. Kennedy resigned<\/a> in 2006 after news leaked about treatment for his drink problem and this time Campbell was elected to the leadership, as Sir Menzies Campbell (knighted in 2004), with a brief to steady the floundering party.<\/p>\n

This he managed to do, even recording a byelection win for the party in the neighbouring Dunfermline and East Fife constituency, but, if there was evidence that the electorate admired his mature and grown-up integrity and courtesy, it was also clear that he struggled to impose himself in the rough-house raucousness of the Commons chamber, particularly at prime minister\u2019s question time, when party leaders are supposed to rally their troops and raise morale. Campbell did not shine: \u201cIt\u2019s theatre, not debate,\u201d he told an interviewer. \u201cI am uncomfortable with that kind of politics.\u201d He seemed dull and nervous, even old-fashioned.<\/p>\n

Within months, the poisonous whisperings about his age surfaced among his younger colleagues. It was a destabilising period, with frustration among some Lib Dem MPs that the party\u2019s long-awaited electoral breakthrough had not occurred and seemed likely to be further deferred with the resurgence of the Tories \u2013 on whose disaffected voters the third party had long relied \u2013 as Labour under its new leader, Brown, started to falter. The contrast in age among the party leaders would have been much less evident had Michael Howard, who was almost Campbell\u2019s contemporary, continued to lead the Tories, but such was the generational shift that Campbell was already captaining the British athletics team before Cameron was even born.<\/p>\n

Campbell\u2019s wife Elspeth told the Sunday Times: \u201cThe sort of cut and thrust \u2013 the bitching and backbiting \u2013 didn\u2019t suit his style. Being young and charismatic seems to be an obsession these days. I think if you are well into your 60s, I think you have probably had it if you want to lead a political party in this country nowadays.\u201d Many of the attacks, repeated in the media, were deeply unfair: the Daily Telegraph, which has more than its share of older readers, had the cheek to conclude: \u201cHe seems older than his years and he is not exactly a spring chicken.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the autumn of 2007, the banking crisis, which would come to dominate the political debate, was erupting and economics was not an issue that would play to Campbell\u2019s strengths. More immediately however, his decision to resign the leadership that October was probably prompted by the electoral breathing space caused by Brown\u2019s ill-fated decision to defer calling a general election earlier that month. Campbell stood down, admitting that questions about his leadership were hindering the party.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Nick Clegg, Menzies Campbell\u2019s successor, said the Lib Dem leader had been brought down by barely disguised ageism. <\/span> Photograph: Danny Lawson\/PA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If so, they were purely internal questions, since he had not had the opportunity to lead the Lib Dems into the electoral test of a general election. While his age might have been compared unfavourably by some with his younger \u2013 and in Cameron\u2019s case more callow \u2013 rivals, his maturity and judgment might yet have had an appeal to an electorate fearful of economic collapse. As it was Clegg \u2013 young enough to be Campbell\u2019s son \u2013 lamented that he had been treated appallingly, brought down by barely disguised ageism.<\/p>\n

Campbell remained in the Commons, re-elected in 2010 in North East Fife with a majority of more than 9,000. On leaving the Commons in 2015 he entered the Lords as Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, named after a fishing village in his former constituency. He became chancellor of St Andrews University in 2006, and his memoir, My Autobiography, was published in 2008.<\/p>\n

In 1970 Campbell married Elspeth, the daughter of Maj Gen Roy Urquhart, one of the heroes of the disastrous Arnhem operation in the second world war. The couple had no children, though Campbell became stepfather to his wife\u2019s son, James Grant-Suttie, from her previous marriage. Elspeth died in June 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n