POLITICIANS think fast on their feet – and ex-Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell was once the quickest man in Britain.
Tributes have poured in for Ming, as he was known by everyone, after he died yesterday aged 84.
‘Ming’ at the World Championships in London, 1964[/caption]
The man considered too old to be a party leader beat OJ Simpson in 1967, setting a British 100m record.
While Simpson went on to infamy, Campbell would become leader of the Lib Dems and a member of the House of Lords.
Walter Menzies Campbell was born in Glasgow in 1941 and raised in a tenement block.
The family lived hand-to-mouth — his joiner father was an alcoholic, which put Ming off whisky for life.
But his mother got him into posh Hillhead High School, where he excelled at athletics and rugby — they called him Ming the Wing.
‘World outside Glasgow’
Campbell joined the Liberals at Glasgow University, later becoming president of the Liberal Club and the uni, where he became lifelong friends with future Labour Leader John Smith and Cabinet ministers Donald Dewar and Derry Irvine.
While studying law, he began breaking Scottish records for the 100 and 200-yard sprints.
He also attended Stanford University in California, a time he described as “a watershed in my life because it made me realise there was a world outside Glasgow”.
Ming returned to Scotland to become a lawyer and in 1970 he fell in love with the daughter of World War Two hero Major General Roy Urquhart, played by Sean Connery in 1977 movie A Bridge Too Far.
Within four weeks of meeting Elspeth, a divorcee with a four-year-old son, they were married.
She was at his side as he tried and failed four times in Parliamentary elections before finally winning North East Fife in 1987. He would be Liberal MP there for 28 years.
His first private members’ bill called for an anabolic steroids ban.
Campbell was made defence spokesman for the newly-formed Liberal Democrats a year later.
When Paddy Ashdown stepped down as leader in 1999, Campbell was the early favourite to succeed him.
But he pulled out of the race after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He made a full recovery after chemotherapy.
Campbell campaigned against the 2003 Iraq War and confronted George W Bush about it during the US President’s state visit to London.
He was given a knighthood and became deputy leader to Charles Kennedy, an alcoholic.
Torn between protecting his friend and saving the party, Sir Ming said: “I felt I was watching a slowly unfolding tragedy.”
In January 2006, Kennedy resigned and Campbell comfortably won the leadership vote.
When Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as PM the following year, support for Labour revived and the Lib Dems struggled.
At 66, Campbell was much older than Brown, then 56 and Tory leader David Cameron, who was 41.
Sir Menzies quipped: “I promise not to take advantage of the youth and inexperience of my opponents.”
After just 19 months as leader, he stepped down — the party’s first leader never to fight an election.
He later wrote: “My resignation was followed by canonisation.”
After quitting as an MP in 2015, he was made a peer as Baron Campbell of Pittenweem.
In his memoirs he modestly wrote: “I see my life as one of experience and not of achievement.”
Then-sprinter Campbell with long jumper Mary Bignal Rand ahead of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo[/caption]
Campbell outside the House of Lords in Westminster in 2006[/caption]
Campbell after being crowned Lib Dem leader in 2006[/caption]
