Tributes to Charles Kennedy

Lord Dodds of Duncairn Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

On an occasion like this, our thoughts are first and foremost with the family of Charles Kennedy, and especially with his young son, Donald. On behalf of my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Democratic Unionist party, we offer them all our sincerest condolences. Their loss is immeasurable, but I hope they find some comfort in the depth, the extent and the tone of the tributes offered in the House today to the man they loved dearly, and whom the country as a whole now mourns.

Charles Kennedy was that rare thing. He was a professional politician from almost the start of his career—he was a politician to his fingertips—but he was one who the public saw as one of their own. They did not see him as someone apart from them or distant from them, but as someone who embodied the very point of why people vote and campaign, and why they become passionate about causes, and why they believe in politics.

Others have charted Charles’s wit and skills as a public speaker from early youth, but the man I saw in this place stood out most of all for his sincerity and his honesty. Following the loss of the leadership of his party, there was nothing but public, professional loyalty to his successors. The party he handed on to them—the party he led to its greatest electoral heights in almost a century—was in enviably good political health.

Charles’s personal tragedy was to be the victim of a terrible disease, the effects of which are intermittent and especially cruel, in that it momentarily robs the sufferer of the ability to be himself. The real Charles Kennedy was the man we remember today and admire, and mourn. He believed utterly in the causes he stood for, without hating anyone else for believing in theirs. He approached each day—I remember meeting him on many mornings—with good-natured relish, free from any contempt for his political foes but absolute in his convictions. From his youth in the House to a far-too-premature passing, the greatest memories he leaves with me and, I suspect, with most of us, are his immense warm heartedness, his tremendous likability and his great good humour.

May God bless all his loved ones and comfort them at this tragic time of bereavement.