The Private Eye editor recalls the passionate Liberal Democrat politician whose wit and warmth endeared him to the public and allowed him to shine on Have I Got News for You

I think Charles would have laughed. David Cameron was one of the last to arrive at his memorial service and walked down the aisle looking for a seat. The only one available was in a pew next to Nick Clegg. “Awkward,” said someone sitting next to me as the prime minister greeted his former coalition partner warmly and sat down.

Politics is a funny business in both senses of the word – bizarre and comic – and Charles Kennedy always had a keen sense of this. It was why the public warmed to him so strongly because he realised that the world that engaged him so passionately could strike ordinary people as strange or ridiculous. Acknowledging this was a way to bridge the gap and he was always very good on Have I Got News for You, irreverently answering questions using exaggerated political cliches or avoiding them entirely using absurd evasive euphemisms. It is not that he was not serious about politics – he was – and the attempts to belittle him as “Chatshow Charlie” backfired early on in his career because his appearances combined a lightness of touch with a visible and genuine commitment to the issues. He was self-deprecating but never to the point of false modesty and there was always a point on Have I Got News for You when you realised that whatever jokes he had made about himself he was nobody’s fool and you would be foolish to make this mistake.

Charles Kennedy: a life in quotes Read more

I think Charles would have been amused at my nervousness in taking part in his memorial service. It was partly that I was not sure I knew him sufficiently well, but also that I was standing at a lectern looking at an incredible gallery of famous political faces in the congregation, many of whom I have not been very kind about over the last few decades. They had come to pay their respects to their late colleague and were having to listen to me recite a poem by Dylan Thomas. It was one of Charles’s favourites and when the family had asked me to read it I had been incredibly flattered. When the moment came and I saw the extraordinary all-party turnout of grandees from the last 30 years of British politics I was glad that Charles’s good friend Lord Wallace had done the jokes and I was just doing the very serious meditation on the comforts of the Resurrection. And Death Shall Have No Dominion required no response from what looked to me like a pretty tough audience.

I like the sentiments of the poem and one of the small triumphs over death one can have is to keep remembering the person who has died. That is why I am happy to continue adding my tributes to all the many others that have been offered to Charles this year. I liked him very much and saw quite a lot of him over the years. We were the same age and throughout our careers often appeared on radio and television together – anything from an early Lent talk for a religious broadcast in which Charles managed to elicit some sympathy for Pontius Pilate’s impossible political position to editions of Question Time where he made the political positions of many of our contemporary leaders impossible. And of course he was a frequent and popular guest on Have I Got News for You long before Boris Johnson had cottoned on to the benefits of engaging with “entertainment television”.

He was self-deprecating but never to the point of false modesty

In fact, the last time I saw Charles was on his very last appearance on Question Time, not long before the general election and just a few months before his death. It was not his finest hour – he rambled a bit and I had to answer endless calls from journalists the next day asking if he was drunk. I said I thought he had probably had a few but then added that I thought “Charles Kennedy had better judgment drunk than most politicians did sober”. In retrospect, all I can really remember is a question about the use of comedy in political advertising to which Charles answered: “Ian and I go back a long way” and then talked affectionately about the 80s and Spitting Image and Have I Got News for You and how we had got to know each other in those days. This was not really an incisive answer to the question but, selfishly, I was rather touched by it.

And this is the elephant in the obituary. I really enjoyed Charles’s company and I admired a lot of what he said and stood for, but I also know that he had a drinking problem and I know that I only saw him at his best. I did not live with him or work with him or deal with any of the consequences of his alcoholism. I met him when he was being fun and funny, convivial and conversational, pointed and passionate. We met in recording studios and bars and in restaurants. But that is still true in its way and it is how I will remember him and how I hope the public will remember the public figure who was, most of the time, at his best for them.

Strangely, I ended up reading out two poems in memory of Charles this year. The first was in St George’s Cathedral in Southwark, at the memorial service in November, and the second was at the National Theatre in the middle of Private Eye’s live review of 2015. We had been featuring poetic obituaries by the Eye’s fictional poet, EJ Thribb, and I thought I would risk ending on this one.

“So Farewell

Then Charles Kennedy

Decent likable

Principled funny

And yet somehow a

politician”

The audience laughed at this and I continued to the closing lines…

“A man of great

Spirit. Though

Alas in the end

Too much of it.



Cheers.”

And then the audience applauded enthusiastically. I think Charles would have laughed. And they were applauding him.