Kennedy walks; doctors say ‘knife deep in back’

Actions have reactions, and the election of David Cameron as the new leader of the Conservative Party, has caused ructions in the Liberal Democrats.  In true Tory Style the Lib Dems have indulged in the dangerous act of regicide and severed the neck of leader Charles Kennedy.

There is no doubt that the energetic arrival of Cameron has left Kennedy’s leadership looking staid and less than dynamic, but this Machiavellian development has the potential to throw the party into a state of flux.  Frontline members of Lib Dem politics are already hailing Menzies Campbell as the unity candidate.

Unity Candidate?  If the Lib Dems are in need of a consolidator then this suggests they are deeply divided. Well if they are then they have brought it on themselves.  The position of the Liberal Democrats as a legitimate political option is tentative, the last thing they need is to be charged as divided by their opponents.  Those who have sniped at Kennedy from behind a veil of anonymity may well rue the day they removed the high-profile leader.

It seems the 64-year-old Campbell is seen as the liberal alternative to Cameron and PM-elect Gordon Brown.  A truly progressive and savvy 3rd party would not challenge Labour and the Conservatives in the airless vacuum that is the centre.  A truly progressive party would position themselves as a real alternative to the New Labour and Cameron’s New LabourLite. As Labour and the Conservatives look to socially engineer every facet of our society, the Lib Dems have the opportunity to position themselves as a real Libertarian alternative to the control-freakery of modern British Politics.

Although inevitably the Liberal Democrats will – like Cameron – follow the tune of Blairism and trot blindly to the centre where the thinning political oxygen will suffocate all but the most adaptive shape-shifters.