Menzies still has plenty to offer

FOR a man fairly recently dethroned from his personal seat of power, branded "over the hill" and tossed on to the political sidelines to make way for a much younger usurper, Sir Menzies Campbell is looking remarkably fit.

In fact, he strides into the ruby red, art-lined dining room of his New Town home looking the epitome of rude health, his athlete's frame towering at 6ft 2in in a well cut single-breast suit, decked out in a pale pink shirt and contrasting silk tie, grinning his familiar gap-toothed smile and looking every inch the senior statesman.

It transpires he's just disembarked from a long yet ultimately pleasant train journey from London after his plans to fly home were scuppered by vile weather – indeed, his bags are still lying in the hall. Sir Menzies, is fresh and, if he is flagging, there's certainly no sign of it.

He made a similar journey from Westminster to the New Town five months earlier under vastly different circumstances when, after weeks of sniping and whispering over whether, at 66, he might have the stamina to lead his party to a General Election a good two years and then beyond, he finally put paid to the speculation and tendered his resignation as leader of the Liberal Democrats.

"I would have preferred to have led the party through a General Election. However that was determined not by my party, or by newspapers but by the Prime Minister deciding not to hold an election.

His decision to abdicate is recorded in an emotionally charged penultimate chapter of his new autobiography, which he launches tonight at the Royal College of Physicians in Queen Street.

In it, it emerges that while his resignation might have been on the cards courtesy of a vicious ageist campaign waged by political and media opponents, Sir Menzies left his Edinburgh home that fateful day never for a moment thinking when he flew back hours later, he would no longer be leader of the nation's third party.

"I called Elspeth and told her I thought I was going to resign. She thought I meant by Christmas, then I said 'no, I mean today'. She said, 'But there's nothing in the fridge'," he recalls with a laugh.

It seems there was another layer to his dramatic decision, the life-changing experience of battling a potentially terminal illness – the hardest challenge this former Olympic athlete, legal advocate and frontline politician ever had to confront.

"I didn't suddenly wake up one day and say 'I feel different'," he explains, casting his mind back five years when doctors at the ERI confirmed that the nagging pains in his legs were actually related to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

"But over a period you do have a change. There's a sense of having gone through all of that, that nothing else is so harrowing or so difficult.

"When someone tells you that you have a condition that in some people is terminal, well that does change your attitude – not in a kind of revolutionary way, but over a period. So now I think of every day as a bonus."

He underwent physically and emotionally gruelling chemotherapy at the Western General, all the time wondering if he was being given privileged treatment because of his political status, but he eventually realised the remarkable efforts of the medical staff were the same for every patient, irrespective of their background.

In a few weeks' time he will return to the Western General for his five-year assessment which he thoroughly expects to confirm he's fighting fit. His only legacy appears to be a slight cardiac problem – a common side-effect of the chemotherapy – coupled with a deep respect for the people who worked to save his life.

That fight for survival, his humble beginnings raised in a simple tenement flat in Glasgow by determined parents – his father had decreed his son would be a lawyer before he had even celebrated his seventh birthday – a remarkable athletics career and a university life that saw him rub shoulders with Scotland's brightest political minds of the time, life for Sir Menzies Campbell has never been particularly dull.

He was born Walter Menzies Campbell – the Walter was dropped almost immediately by his mother who resolved that no son of hers would bear the initials WC – of Highland stock with a gentle nature which appears to have masked an underlying determination to succeed.

Inspired by hearing radio reports from the 1948 Olympics, in London he pushed himself into an athletics career, eventually reaching a dramatic peak in the 1964 Tokyo Games. His relay squad returned home empty-handed yet he looks back on the experience – along with breaking a 53-year-old Scottish 300 yards record at Murrayfield in 1961 – as among his greatest life achievements.

It was November 1, 1968, when he finally settled in Edinburgh to continue his legal career at the Bar. Within two years he had met and married Elspeth, eventually taking over a small but charming flat in Candlemaker Row overlooking Greyfriars Kirkyard – a far cry from the grand terraced Georgian townhouse they now call home.

They threw themselves into politics, theatre, sport and legal life. There were two failed attempts to win Greenock for the Liberals before Sir Menzies was drafted in to fight East Fife for the party, securing his first stint as MP in 1987.

Life may have revolved around London, but Edinburgh is where Sir Menzies calls home, and like everyone else in town he has an opinion on the Capital's most controversial issue: trams.

"The only way to get people out of their cars is if they are satisfied there is good public transport. I'm in favour of anything we can do to persuade us all to give up our reliance on the motor car," he insists.

"I've given up my 12 cylinder 5.3 litre Jaguar XJS on the grounds that it wasn't environmentally friendly, it's now in a motor museum in Aberlady.

"It was tough to do, I loved it dearly, it purred along beautifully. But now in London I drive a Mini that has been converted to LPG and in Edinburgh I have a Volkswagen Passat diesel. There's no point preaching to people if you don't demonstrate you're own willingness to change. It's essential we do everything in our power to hinder global warming."

As for local politics, the dawning of a Lib Dem-run city council is, he believes, the beginning of a change in fortunes for the party at national level – even if Edinburgh's ruling administration got off to a woeful beginning thanks to the schools closure debacle.

"I believed they have now retrieved the position on schools," he insists. "There was a determination to have fresh thinking at first and to face up to the problems of falling school rolls and to find a balance between the financial implications and the provision of education.

"You could say there was some naivety, but these are all experiences from which people learn."

He's learned a lot too in his 66 years, and he's not over yet. He has told his constituency party that he's available for reselection and he has formally indicated he intends to return to the Bar, to resume a legal career which has saw him turn down becoming a judge in favour of politics.

He concludes: "I have had great good fortune to have had these opportunities in sport, law and politics. I've had a very lucky life."

• Sir Menzies Campbell, My Autobiography is published by Hodder and Stoughton, price £20. He will appear in conversation at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Queen St, tonight at 7pm. Tickets cost £5.

'Prime Minister's Questions is very much about theatre'

Sir Menzies' views range far and wide over a variety of topics, including:

PM'S QUESTIONS
"One of the things I felt difficult was dealing with Prime Minister's Question Time because it is very much about theatre – it's not about substance at all, it's about performance. Maybe if I had spent more time in amateur dramatics I would have done better..."

US ELECTION
"I've had $10 on John McCain to win for 18 months – it's not impossible that he might do it. There are a lot of don't knows in the States."

MEADOWBANK STADIUM
"There's lots of memories attached to Meadowbank for me. If the only way to provide a modern stadium is to sell an area of land for housing, then perhaps that is what will have to happen. Meadowbank is 40 years old, it cost £3m to build – by today's standards that is chickenfeed.

"If we can generate funds to give us a first-class stadium with first-class facilities then we should do it."

AGE
"There were suggestions that I was too old, then there have been suggestions that my successor Nick Clegg isn't experienced enough – it goes to show you can't find a happy medium."

RESIGNING AS LEADER
"No-one was saying 'tough it out' and you have to be realistic about these things. What is the purpose of leadership? It's to maximise the impact and the representation of the party – if you can't do that, then it's a matter of duty to say 'right, I'll step down'.

REGRETS
"My big regret is I wish I had done more academic work at university. That said, I did have fun."