Iraq war 'significant factor'

On Sunday, 21 September 2003, Breakfast with Frost featured an interview with Charles Kennedy, MP Leader, Liberal Democrats

Please note "BBC Breakfast with Frost" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

'This is not a party that is dying on its feet'.

DAVID FROST: Like Greenwich, Crosby and Eastbourne, the name of Brent East looks set to go down in political history, because it was there on Thursday night that Labour suffered its first by-election defeat in 15 years.

But to the Liberal Democrats victory is casting a warm glow over their conference this week in Brighton.

And here's the man with the warm glow himself - party leader Charles Kennedy. Good morning Charles.

CHARLES KENNEDY: David, a very good morning to you - and it's getting nice and warm here, weather wise as well as politically.

DAVID FROST: As well as politically. Do you think, do you think that the war in Iraq was a big factor or a medium factor in your victory in Brent East?

CHARLES KENNEDY: I think it was a significant factor, there's no doubt about that, and it's not just the reflection of the social mix of that particular constituency, although it is one of the most socially mixed in the entire United Kingdom.

I think you would find much the same, as I did in May of this year in the run up to the local elections, right across Scotland, England and Wales.

There is a great anxiety and of course the more that we've heard, the more that has come out from the Hutton inquiry, the more people are questioning the basis on which they were sold the case for this war.

But, what was more significant than the issue of Iraq itself and the aftermath, it seems to me, is that the erosion of trust in Tony Blair personally, and the government as a whole, also peeps through to many other issues and in Brent this showed itself up on the local and domestic issues - the public services, the perceived failings which were physically apparent to anybody just looking at the rubbish uncollected on the streets, that I think was a very corrosive factor for the government, of which Iraq was a principle component but by no means the only one.

DAVID FROST: And do you think, what's the mystery factor, we've quoted some of these great by-election victories of the past, but usually the seat is returned to the Conservatives or, or Labour in the next election, or quite often. How are you going to avoid that fate in Brent East?

CHARLES KENNEDY: Well there are mixed omens on previous history. If you take inner London seats, my colleague Simon Hughes, like me, has been an MP for 20 years since his famous victory in Bermondsey in Southwark in 1983. And indeed of course, one of the other interesting, many interesting sub-plots in Brent, given Ken Livingstone's very high profile on that campaign, and Simon now being our candidate for the London Mayor election next year, is the knock on effect this is going to have.

I suspect Ken Livingstone is a mightily worried man and Simon should have a, an additional spring in his usually ebullient step as a result of what's happened. I think the other additional factor, however, is that when you look at the base upon which we win by-elections today as a national party it is so much bigger, so much deeper, so much more robust than what tended to happen in decades gone by. This is a much bigger party now, it's much more dug in and it's got much more of a, a national profile and a credibility - that will make a huge difference come the next general election.

DAVID FROST: And even the Telegraph says that maybe the Conservatives are no longer even the natural party of opposition. Is your, what seemed a whacko dream, is your dream of being the new opposition getting closer?

CHARLES KENNEDY: Well I must admit that I'm glad I'm not taking my strategy lessons or ideas from whoever it is that's putting ideas into Iain's head - Iain Duncan Smith's head. I must admit that when I saw yesterday that he was telling his own people, his own clan in Scotland politically, this was actually strategically a big blunder by the Liberal Democrats to come from third place to win this by-election, this struck me as a very curious take on politics because the big problem for the Tories now is that we are the principle challengers to them in very many of their constituencies right across the country - there's a piece in one of the Sunday papers this morning which predicts a swing of only half what we achieved in Brent and it would - I was going to say decimate but decimate only takes out one tenth of the available opponents, it would, it would take out 90% of the leading Conservatives in the land.

Far from this portraying the Lib Dems as some kind of left of Labour party, which is nonsense, what it does indicate is that for disillusioned Conservatives who are looking for an opposition party in a democracy which can take on this government and can beat it.

Their own party, their own previous party allegiance threw in the towel on this by-election, we took the fight to the government and we won. That's going to be a big help to us when we're contesting all these seats against Conservatives as well.

DAVID FROST: You said various phrases along the way, Charlie, about Iraq, that it, we were, it was a false premise, the war was taken, taken to war on a false premise, the case for war was exaggerated and so on and so forth. Do you think we were deliberately misled by the government?

CHARLES KENNEDY: Well I think the definitive answer on that will probably arise from the, some of the conclusions at least, despite his quite tightly drawn remit, from Lord Hutton itself.

We will be able to, and we are indeed as time goes on forming a better basis of conclusion, but what undoubtedly is the case, just on the facts of the matter that we now know, if you look at the dossier that was produced exactly at this time last year, in fact it was delivered by Special Branch to me here in Brighton, as it was to Iain Duncan Smith the night before that famous parliamentary debate, we now know that that dossier could have included a statement saying that Iraq did not have the capacity to launch a nuclear strike in Britain.

That appeared in the first draft of the document, it did not appear in the document that was delivered to the public at the time. It could also have made clear that the threat from Iraq was not, or of the intelligence assessing the threat from Iraq, did warn that this could increase, rather than decrease, the overall dangers posed by terrorism. That was not made clear either.

Now if people and MPs had had more of the two sides of the argument, of the various aspects of the argument to weigh up, I'm not sure the result would have been so definitive from Tony Blair's point of view.

DAVID FROST: Tell me Charlie, these stories that appear from time to time, whispering stories and so on, about you and the subject of drink, the latest one was the Daily Mail late last week, or late this week if you take Sunday to be the end of one week and not the beginning of the next, but do you ever get tempted with those stories to sue?

CHARLES KENNEDY: Oh I think in public life, you know, never complain, never sue, because it's clearly not having any impact this kind of thing with the outside world - not at all. I think what we've got to - and I've been saying this for the past three years - as a party the more bold and the more relevant and the bigger and better we become, the more we come under attack, and for any political party the principle focus of attack is always going to be the leader. Now we've just got to be resilient about this sort of thing.

It doesn't cut ice with people outside and I don't think that if you look on the track record of this calendar year, our biggest ever share of the national vote, 30% in the May local elections; I spent 22 days out on the road carrying the case for the party in all of that; holding together with integrity, consistency, principle over Iraq; and then of course topping it off with the icing on the cake which was that Brent win, it doesn't seem to me like a leadership that is inactive or lacking engagement or enthusiasm for the cause.

DAVID FROST: Absolutely clear response there, yes. Now one last question, which is, can you really do the thing that people worry about, can you appeal with the same policies to Brent East and say Maidstone?

CHARLES KENNEDY: Well we've done it already at the last general election, on the same national manifesto we won Guildford from the Conservatives, we won Chesterfield, Tony Blair's - Tony Benn's, a Freudian slip that one - Tony Benn's old constituency from Labour. So we can. And why can we?

I think that what sums it up for me, take both ends of the age spectrum: parents worried about their children becoming students, ex-Conservative voters always assumed their kids would be able to get university degrees, for the first time they've had to worry about being able to afford it. Ex-Labour voters, thinking they would never have to face that financial burden with a Labour government, now having to consider whether their children will be able to aspire to university education. At the other end of the age spectrum -

DAVID FROST: But the - but the thing is a lot of people say that -

CHARLES KENNEDY: - concerned about long term care charges for their aged parents. We're the only people with direct-costed policies that appeal to those who have previously wanted to vote Labour or Conservative, they're increasingly coming to the Liberal Democrats.

DAVID FROST: But there's no doubt, you were to the left of Labour in Brent East and you can't do that in a lot of -

CHARLES KENNEDY: No we were not. No we were not to the left of Labour in Brent East whatsoever. What we put forward in Brent East was a number of things: there was our stance on the international situation, there was our stance and our policies on the national situation, particularly improved delivery, as well as the funding, for the public services, and there was our attention to the local issues which had been so neglected by that Labour local authority over so many years.

Now that's what appealed to people in Brent, and I probably spoke to as many voters in Brent as anyone over these past two or three months and do you know something? Not once, not on a single occasion, unprompted, did any member of the public mention to me the politics of left or right.

What they want are the politics that address people's concerns, the concerns of their communities and what are you, Mr Kennedy and the Liberal Democrats, going to do about it? Have you got solutions to our problems? We talked positively about people's aspirations and about the interest that we all have as a society we do best, rather than wasting our time with vocabulary that doesn't mean anything to anybody.

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