Love and Liberty

Anyone listening to the BBC’s headlines about Charles Kennedy this morning will be misled. Shocking, I know. I admit I’ve read the Times pieces (oh, look, a newspaper that means us no good is serialising this; another shock), and while they’re in no way helpful to Charles or the Lib Dems in general, the headlines still misrepresent them. He “had a serious drink problem before he took up the post,” says Today, “and senior Liberal Democrats concealed it from the electorate.” You’d think that was one headline, but in fact – if the Times’ story is fact – it’s two.

Charles was elected Leader in 1999; according to The Times and the new hatchet job biography, the meeting where he admitted to four senior Lib Dems that he was an alcoholic was in, er, 2003. Even Millennium can work out on his fluffy feet that the numbers come in the wrong order for the way the headlines are presenting them and that they’ve conflated two stories in the most damaging but least truthful way.

I can’t see any good that’ll come out of going into exactly who did what at the beginning of the year, and said I’d stop talking about it on the morning of the Leadership election. No-one has given any reason why re-opening the wounds will be of the slightest use to anyone but our political opponents and Mr Murdoch’s circulation figures, and I’m not wildly enthusiastic about boosting either. Let’s just make the best of where we are now, eh? I hope both Charles and Ming give satisfying speeches in Brighton, and I suspect that’ll see them taking the fight to our opponents rather than navel-gazing little bands of followers still thinking it’s clever to turn their fire on each other.

8.10 Update after Blogger comes back online: I’d sent a complaint to the Today site before posting here, after being infuriated by the 6.30, 7.00 and 7.30 headlines. I suspect others complained too, as the 8 am news carefully separated the two claims into distinct sentences. Still not a helpful story, of course, but no longer an outright lie from the BBC.