Under attack: Charles Kennedy during the election campaign

Early on May 8, a few hours after losing his Parliamentary seat, Charles Kennedy drove to his whitewashed crofter’s cottage in the Highland village of Caol.

His mood, during the two-hour journey from Dingwall, where the count had taken place, was one of sadness and reflection. It was, after all, the end of a distinguished 32-year Commons career which had spanned almost his entire adult life.

That the development came three weeks after the death of Kennedy’s beloved father, Ian, who had lived next door, only added to his melancholy. Yet if the former Liberal Democrat leader expected to spend the ensuing hours grieving in peace, he would be sorely mistaken. For as he pulled up outside the tidy cottage, built a stone’s throw from the river Lochy by his late grand-father, Donald, he came across what appeared to be a nasty ‘welcome home’ present. ‘It was a Friday morning, when the rubbish gets taken out in and around Fort William,’ recalls Kennedy’s campaign manager, Conn O’Neill.

‘When Charles got back to the cottage, he discovered his bins upturned and left at the end of his driveway. It seemed as if someone had gone through them and spread the contents everywhere.

‘There was litter all over the place. Most of it ended up strewn over the field across the road.’

This unedifying act of vandalism — carried out, O’Neill assumes, by someone loyal to Kennedy’s political opponent — wasn’t the only unpleasantness he came home to that morning, either.

A few hours earlier, the veteran Parliamentarian had, with customary grace, delivered a concession speech congratulating that opponent, the SNP’s Ian Blackford, and thanking the voters of Ross, Skye and Lochaber for their years of support.

Reflecting on events across Scotland, where Labour and Lib Dem candidates had been all but wiped out by the SNP, he’d then joked that the nation was undergoing a ‘night of the long sgian dubhs’.

As a keen student of British political history, Kennedy intended the comment, O’Neill says, as a humorous reference to 1962’s famous ‘night of the long knives’ (a sgian dubh is a Scottish ceremonial dagger), during which Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet.

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Kennedy was said to have spent much of his time, since polling day, with his ten-year-old son, Donald, by his former wife Sarah, from whom he separated in 2010

Yet in paranoid corners of the internet where conspiracy theories fester, SNP supporters instead decided that he was attempting to compare them to Hitler’s Nazis, who in 1934 carried out a series of political murders which also became known as the ‘night of the long knives’.

As day broke, the already grief-stricken Kennedy, therefore, found himself being subjected to a hysterical and somewhat surreal barrage of abuse via Twitter and Facebook.

A cabal of aggressive SNP supporters, part of a movement known colloquially as ‘Cybernats’, spent the ensuing hours spouting bile, describing him as (among other things) ‘disgraceful’, ‘despicable’, a ‘nasty, bitter man’, a ‘sore loser’ and a ‘sad, diminished figure’.

Politics is, of course, no place for the thin-skinned. Yet there can be little doubt Kennedy was dismayed by this turn of events.

Coming on the back of an often revoltingly hostile election battle (which we shall look at in detail later), the barrage of abuse arrived at a time when this outwardly tough but inwardly emotional man was already feeling highly vulnerable.

He’d not just lost both his father and his Commons career, but was also fighting a tough battle with alcohol addiction, which had for years left him prone to bouts of depression.

Despite the discreet efforts of his partner Carole MacDonald, widow of his late university friend Murdo, he’d suffered a series of recent lapses, including one which resulted in a notorious appearance on BBC 1’s Question Time, in which he’d slurred words and at times appeared not to be following the debate.

‘Charles was like anyone else: he wanted to be loved,’ is how a leading Scottish Liberal Democrat puts it. ‘He was quite philosophical about losing. In fact, he saw it coming before the rest of us. But he liked to be regarded fondly, and was knocked sideways by the campaign and the way the SNP and its supporters went after him, before, during and after polling day.

Charles Kennedy was the victim of extensive personal attacks from SNP loyalists

‘It was unnecessary, and at times very unpleasant. Exactly the sort of thing that, alongside a bereavement, would drive a man like him to drink.’

Today, there is, of course, a desperately sad footnote to the events of election night: on Monday, just over three weeks later, Kennedy was found dead by Carole MacDonald at the same modest Highland cottage. He was 55.

A post-mortem made public by his family yesterday revealed Kennedy had suffered a ‘major haemorrhage’, which was said to be ‘a consequence of his battle with alcoholism’.

In tributes, friends and colleagues expressed sadness and shock at Kennedy’s passing, saying he’d seemed optimistic about the future, and had intended to both take up a peerage and spend the coming months campaigning for Britain to stay in the EU.

He was also said to have spent much valuable time, since polling day, enjoying the company of his ten-year-old son, Donald, by his former wife Sarah, from whom he separated in 2010.

Yet behind Charles Kennedy’s bonhomous facade, things were not necessarily quite so rosy. Indeed, according to many of those closest to him, a dark shadow was thrown over his final weeks.

It revolved — as the vandalism and vilification detailed above suggests — around a remarkably vigorous political hate campaign levelled at him during his ill-fated General Election battle.

Waged not just in cyberspace, but also in the streets of his large Highland constituency, it saw the SNP’s loyalists mount extensive personal attacks on a deliberate and concerted basis.

At times, according to one of Scotland’s most senior Lib Dem officials, their behaviour strayed close to harassment.

‘I have never known aggression like it in 30 years of politics,’ said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of SNP reprisals. ‘He and his staff were shouted at on doorsteps, and had leaflets thrown in their face. But the worst of it happened online, where he was just monstered.

‘It’s a form of bullying that would not be tolerated in any playground. Charles tried to rise above it, but he couldn’t always. It must have hurt.’

His beloved dad had just passed away

To appreciate the general tone of such nastiness, you need only glance at Twitter, where, on the morning of election day, Kennedy remarked: ‘Campaign teams across the constituency are fighting hard to win, polls are open until 10pm. Spare me a thought.’

A few seconds later, an SNP supporter called Paul Smythe responded to this innocuous comment as follows: ‘I will give you a thought tomorrow when you are where you belong, retired and not a drunken embarrassment any more.’

It was just one of hundreds of similar abusive messages in which SNP supporters had sought to exploit Kennedy’s drink problem.

Days earlier, to take another example at random, another user of the site, called Donald P. Maclean, whose Twitter profile carried an SNP logo, had dubbed him a ‘drunken alcoholic a**ehole’, while a man called Mark Rooney called him an ‘alkie c**t’.

The political hate campaign against Kenned was waged not just in cyberspace, but also in the streets of his large Highland constituency

When Kennedy shared a tweet urging supporters to ‘display a poster in your window in support of Charles’, a Cybernat called Claire Robertson responded: ‘Just put an empty old whisky bottle in your window. It’s the same thing.’

On a Facebook chatroom for SNP supporters in Skye, meanwhile, a woman called Elaine Whiteman said he should ‘get back in the pub’. One David Baldwin called him a ‘useless mess’. On Kennedy’s own Facebook page a William Paterson said he was ‘pished’ and a Terry McAulay said he’d been ‘on the drinky poos again’.

So sustained was the abuse that members of Kennedy’s campaign team were employed — on an almost full-time basis — to delete offensive messages from his social media accounts.

They were unable to police the wider media, however. In March, the National, a pro-independence Scottish newspaper, published a hurtful cartoon attempting to make fun of his alcoholism by depicting a wide-eyed, pale-faced Kennedy sweating over a pint of lager.

You can, by the by, look in vain for concerted efforts by SNP candidates and officials to stem this tide of unpleasantness.

Indeed, on many occasions, the party’s senior activists appear to have been directly responsible for it.

Take Brian Smith, who describes himself as ‘convenor’ of the party’s Skye and Lochalsh branch, and whose Twitter feed is followed by four SNP MPs, including Mr Blackford.

In January alone, Smith used the social networking site to contact Kennedy more than 50 times, calling him a ‘Quisling’ — a term of abuse meaning ‘traitor’ — and filing a vile message attacking his alcoholism.

Charles tried to rise above it, but it must have hurt

‘I am disgusted at you not doing your job,’ it read. ‘Do you have a “problem” that stops you going to Westminster?’ Between then and polling day, Smith — who, remember, is supposedly an SNP convenor — used Twitter to directly attack Mr Kennedy more than a hundred times.

‘The things people direct at politicians can be vile,’ says Kennedy’s campaign manager, Mr O’Neill. ‘But what was shocking about the SNP is that they just didn’t let up.

‘Some of it was awful: people accusing him of defending paedophiles, for example, or spreading other nonsense that they’d found online.

‘Charles found it upsetting. He was from a different era. You’ll have seen him described as a Highland gentleman a lot in recent days, and that’s how he conducted his politics.’

Not everyone played that game, however. In January, Ian Blackford decided to launch a ‘where’s Charlie?’ Twitter hashtag to highlight what he called Kennedy’s ‘poor voting record’.

Blackford’s campaign was underpinned by Commons records which indicated that Kennedy had participated, during recent years, only in around a third of Westminster votes. ‘Voters of Ross, Skye and Lochaber need a hard-working MP who will stand up for their interests and clearly, from these numbers, Charles Kennedy is not that man,’ Blackford told reporters.

Supporters duly piled in, dubbing Kennedy lazy, drunken and worse.

Yet there was a good reason for the MP’s voting record. And it wasn’t anything to do with either drink or his alleged laziness.

Instead, say friends, Kennedy had since 2012 been forced to spend extra time in his constituency because the death of his mother, Mary, had left him as the main carer for his elderly father.

‘For a time leading up to Mary’s death, both parents were in different hospitals, and Charles spent his time shuttling between them,’ says a friend.

Then, last March, a second family tragedy saw his brother, Ian (who also lived next door), suffer a seizure which left him paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, adding to the burden on the politician, whose only other sibling, sister Isabel, lives in Canada.

Blackford and his supporters seemed unwilling to let these pressing facts get in the way of a good campaign, however. Instead, they continued to cruelly ask ‘where’s Charlie?’ even after Kennedy had been forced to suspend his election campaign following the death of his father on April 5.

On Twitter, trolls called him a traitor and a drunkard

As late as April 20, a woman called Emma Roddick used the hashtag during a discussion at a hustings meeting in Strathpeffer. Ms Roddick, for what it’s worth, is constituency assistant to Fergus Ewing, an SNP member of the Scottish Parliament.

Against such a backdrop, it’s perhaps unsurprising that hostility against Charles Kennedy would also break out in public.

From the earliest stages of the campaign, SNP activists had repeatedly sought to hijack his public appearances, with an onlooker at a Highland event in March reporting: ‘Charles Kennedy

just walked past me with a wee girl, & SNP folk are holding up signs, shouting and giving him the V sign.’

Things went nuclear, however, on April 15, after Kennedy had circulated campaign literature which described his SNP opponent Ian Blackford, a former senior executive at Deutsche Bank, as a ‘well-funded banker from Edinburgh’.

Angered by the jibe, Blackford took the extraordinary step of marching into Kennedy’s campaign office in Fort William that morning, accompanied by four supporters. He then demanded that Mr Kennedy withdraw the allegation, which Blackford regarded as inaccurate.

‘He was angry, aggressive and unpleasant, wagging his finger at us,’ said Lib Dem activist Candy Piercy, who witnessed the incident. A party spokesman, who insisted that Blackford was, indeed, a banker from Edinburgh, accused him of ‘bullying and intimidatory behaviour’.

Hostilities continued at a hustings event that night in Dingwall.

Kennedy, 55, was found dead by Carole MacDonald at the same modest Highland cottage

‘The SNP man spoke very little about policy, he just spent the entire time attacking Charles,’ recalls the former SDP leader Lord Maclennan of Rogart, who was present. ‘He was seriously unpleasant, in my opinion.’

Mr O’Neill adds: ‘He was ranting and raving. Charles was saddened and perplexed that someone who had a chance of becoming an MP would behave in that manner. It just wasn’t his sort of politics.’ Ironically, perhaps, the same Ian Blackford has spent much of this week on the airwaves, delivering fulsome tributes to the late Charles Kennedy, saying: ‘I deeply regret the passing of this extremely talented man.’

When I spoke to him yesterday, Blackford vigorously denied condoning abuse of Kennedy during the campaign, and said his team had gone to ‘great lengths’ to prevent their supporters attacking him.

He also described the events of April 15 as ‘friendly’, and rejected the Lib Dem party’s allegation of ‘bullying and intimidatory behaviour’.

‘I have known Charles a long time, I have a huge degree of respect for him, and I have never and would never support any kind of personal attack on him,’ he said. ‘I also did all I could to prevent anyone else behaving in such a way.’

He added: ‘My campaign was pretty universally positive,’ and claimed, with regard to the ‘where’s Charlie?’ campaign, that Kennedy’s poor voting record pre-dated his mother’s death.

Sad to relate, Mr Blackford’s supporters aren’t all singing from the same song sheet, however.

Take the aforementioned SNP supporter Paul Smythe. A few minutes after news of Charles Kennedy’s death had broken earlier this week, Smythe posted a very instructive final message to the late MP on Twitter.