Andy McSmith's Diary: How I dropped Charles Kennedy in it...

Kennedy's response after I asked him about cannabis law got him in a spot of bother - but I never heard an angry word from him about it

Charles Kennedy Campaigns For The Lib Dems in Bearsden (Getty)

The tributes paid to Charles Kennedy were genuine. He was a supremely talented and popular political leader destroyed by an addiction to alcohol. I was granted the first interview with him after his election to the Lib Dem leadership in 1999.

He was talking a lot of sense, but not providing me with anything that would make an eye-catching headline, so as the interview drew to a close I asked him about cannabis. His predecessor, Paddy Ashdown, had battled hard to stop the Lib Dems from taking a soft line on drugs. I knew very well that Kennedy did not agree with him. Getting him to say so would make a great front-page story.

Kennedy did a double take, the adviser at his side made a move as if to tell him to shut up, but after a moment’s thought, he went staunchly on to give a straight answer. He said that the law on cannabis was too harsh, drug laws generally were a mess, and that there should be a Royal Commission to clear them up.

The following morning, I turned on the radio to hear Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative shadow Home Secretary, fulminating about Kennedy’s irresponsibility. “Charles Kennedy clearly has yet to learn how a responsible party leader should behave,” she said. “This is an unbelievable first commitment which will alienate many of the people who put a cross by his name.”

I never heard an angry word from Kennedy for dropping him in it.

Not the Beeb’s fault

The Daily Mail, of course, will never pass an opportunity to attack the BBC. In March, after Kennedy had put in an excruciating performance on Question Time, the Mail suggested that it was the BBC’s fault for letting him go on air when drunk. Yesterday, their columnist Andrew Pierce repeated the accusation on Twitter.

For the record, Kennedy was not given alcohol by anyone from the BBC. Other participants in the programme have told me that he turned up at the studio at the last moment, and did not join them in the hospitality suite. He must have been drunk before he arrived.

Assuming that the floor manager even spotted the problem in time, was he or she supposed to tell a politician of Kennedy’s stature to go home and dry out?

Reaching for the stars

The author Dominic Shelmerdine, who put a book together by writing to famous people asking them what their first ambition was, solicited a reply from Charles Kennedy that having watched the Moon landings on television at the age of 10 “one of my first ambitions, not surprisingly, was to be an astronaut”.

Crossing the fine line

“I hope you realise what a fine line you are treading,” read an ominous email from Matthew Smith, a Ukip councillor, after I noted that police investigating alleged electoral fraud in Norfolk had seized his computer. I hope I won’t be crossing that “fine line” if I just mention that Matthew Smith has been sentenced to 200 hours community work and disqualified as a county councillor for five years after admitting that he forged signatures on a nomination paper.

Rearguard action The Labour MP Ronnie Campbell was rebuked by the Speaker John Bercow yesterday for mentioning a minister’s bottom. “Why don’t you get off that backside of yours?” he said to the health minister, Ben Gummer.

“May I just exhort you to have some regard to considerations of taste. This is a new minister,” said the Speaker. Do we infer that it is OK to say that sort of thing to an old minister?