Rt Hon Charles Kennedy MP

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2003

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the leader of the Liberal Democrats Charles Kennedy. Born in Inverness, Charles grew up on a croft near Fort William spending his early life learning how to shear sheep and milk cows on his grandfather's neighbouring farm. Music was always a big part of life with his father playing the fiddle at home and at local events but Charles's real passion was astronomy. He saved to buy a three-inch refractor telescope from his pocket money inspired by the Apollo Moon Landings and encouraged by the clear Highlands skies.

Politics and current affairs were another early passion. He ran home from school to catch news of the Watergate hearings on television, he was a star of his school's debating society and one friend recalls how he always dreamed of becoming prime minister. His first political allegiance was to the Labour Party, but at University he switched to the newly formed Social Democratic Party - eventually taking a seat for them in 1983 General Election at the age of 23. Now, 20 years later, following various incarnations of the party, the Liberal Democrats hold a record number of seats in the House of Commons and are hoping to become the main party of opposition in Britain today.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Cameron Highlanders by Ian Kennedy Book: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth Luxury: CD player

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a politician. He first entered parliament 20 years ago, the surprise
0:35.0	winner of his home seat in Scotland. He was 23 years old and his arrival at Westminster
0:40.1	was only the third time he'd been to London in his life.
0:43.0	But this good Catholic Highland boy was already a fire with politics,
0:47.0	a president of the Union at Glasgow University,
0:50.0	a Fulbright scholar, and the author of a thesis on the rhetoric of Roy Jenkins.
0:55.3	He became a performer too, seen and heard on radio and television chat shows almost as much as
1:00.5	on the floor of the Commons.
1:02.4	Four years ago he became leader of his party.
1:05.2	He has big ambitions for it, but it's not his whole life. I'm a fairly normal human being, he says.
1:11.2	I aim to enjoy life beyond politics.
1:14.2	He is the leader of the Liberal Democrats Charles Kennedy.
1:17.4	20 years in the House, Charles, apparently when you first turned up,
1:20.9	you didn't know where Westminster was? didn't I was bunking in a
1:25.9	friend's spare bedroom in Hammersmith and I didn't know how you got from Hammersmith
1:31.0	to Westminster I didn't know how you got from heathmith to Westminster. I didn't know how you got from Heathrow to Hammersmith.
1:35.6	So it was even worse than that. So you arrived there feeling a bit of an outside.
1:39.6	Obviously very, very young, very gangly, can we imagine this? Yes, yes imagine this yes well ganglier than I am now
1:45.5	that's for sure yes I very wet behind the ears and there was a whole lot of
1:51.4	things that all happened in a rush and you just got on with it.
	...

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