'A man of achievement matched by few': Tribute to Lord Campbell by Alistair Carmichael
Menzies Campbell: 22 May 1941 – 26 September 2025 | Image by: Alamy / PA Images
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With a formidable list of accomplishments including Olympian, parliamentarian and King’s Counsel, Menzies Campbell was also a man of enormous loyalty and kindness
Ming (or Walter Menzies Campbell as he was christened) was born in Glasgow in 1941 in the Hillhead area of Glasgow, educated at Hillhead High School from where he went to Glasgow University to study to pursue his various loves of athletics, debating and politics.
I first met Ming in 1983. At this point he was still four years away from his first election to parliament. He was a man of immediate and obvious presence with a great career as an Olympic sprinter and already senior counsel as a member of the Faculty of Advocates.
Ming was first elected to parliament for North East Fife in 1987. He would doubtless have got there sooner as a Labour or Conservative candidate but he was a liberal and for him that always mattered.
He took the skills of advocacy and courtroom presence into the Commons Chamber and quickly established himself as someone who would bring people into the chamber when his name appeared on the annunciator.
One of my earliest recollections of him as a parliamentary colleague comes from the aftermath of 9/11. Ming was in the far east when it happened and some of the party messaging had been confused. It made for a slightly tense first meeting of the parliamentary party before the House was recalled but Ming, fresh off a plane, was able to bring us all together by articulating a position that was rooted in sound liberal principles of internationalism and respect for the rule of law but which was prepared to respond vigorously to the atrocity that we had just witnessed.
He was a man of immediate and obvious presence
What followed from 9/11 to the outbreak of war in Iraq was arguably his finest years in parliament. Standing out against Tony Blair’s ill-founded war in Iraq, not from a position of pacifism, or even anti-American sentiment as some did, but from a proper regard for international law and due process.
Throughout that time, however, not everything was easy or happy in the Liberal Democrats. Charles Kennedy’s well-known but unacknowledged battle with alcoholism was causing difficulties internally. When Kennedy resigned in 2006 it felt to many like this was Ming’s moment to step up to the plate which he did.
Historians may debate how different things might have been had he stood for the leadership in 1999 but he hadn’t and by 2006 there was a changing of the guard as a new political generation was emerging.
The press narrative emerged that he was too old, too stiff, too lawyerly for modern politics. In other words, all the things that had made his reputation as a parliamentarian were now seen as problems. After less than two years in the role, he resigned.
The end of his leadership of the Liberal Democrats, however, was far from the end of his political career. He remained in the Commons until standing down in 2015. He then took a peerage and sat in the House of Lords as Lord Campbell of Pittenween. He remained a regular attender and contributor there until a few months before his death on 26 September.
The sudden death of his wife, Elspeth, in June 2023 was a blow from which Ming never completely recovered. As a couple they had been soulmates and, after her passing, he lost some of his spark.
Olympian, parliamentarian, King’s Counsel, Companion of Honour. The list of achievements and honours is formidable and matched by few but it only shows a fraction of the whole picture. What it doesn’t show is a man capable of enormous loyalty and kindness to his friends. I consider myself blessed to have been one of them and I shall miss him like few others.
Alistair Carmichael is Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland
