Free Standing Down by Rosa Prince Page A

was a popular leader, his heavy drinking took a toll and in 2007 he was forced out. This time Sir Menzies would not miss his chance.
    A point came at which it became clear that it was in the best interest of Charles and in the party’s interest that he should stand down:
    There were people who were saying to me: ‘Look, if he goes’ – some of them were saying ‘when he goes’ – ‘will you do it?’
    I was a bit nervous because of [my] age. I knew it was going to be an issue. I was sixty-five. But it seemed to me that I was capable of doing it in a rather different way.
    I was leading the party that Asquith had led. So one couldn’t avoid feeling a certain sense of satisfaction about that.
    There were three things. One was to restore stability. Second was to make the party professional because it was pretty slack. The third was to prepare for a general election. Because it was clear that at some stage Blair was going to step down. He’d won three elections in succession, he was going to step down and we were going to have to prepare for an election.
    Sir Menzies was right to be concerned that his age would be a factor in how he was perceived as party leader.
    In contrast to the youthful Tony Blair and David Cameron, the bespectacled Sir Menzies appeared somewhat elderly, particularly in their set-piece encounters at PMQs.
    From the start, the weekly bouts were an ordeal, quickly becoming the worst experience of his twenty-eight years in the Commons. He now believes it should be abandoned – a view that is increasingly shared by those who deplore its ‘yah–boo’, Punch & Judy nature:
    Not being able, in the beginning, to carry off PMQs, I disliked that. I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to master that immediately.
    What people forget is that if you’re Leader of the Opposition at PMQs, at least half the House is behind you. If you are the leader of the third party, then five-sixths of the House is against you.
    We worked on it. There’s a public affairs company that has a mock studio in its basement and we went off and we practised. And I practised and practised and practised.
    This may seem totally unimportant but if you look very closely at [Ed] Miliband, there are the papers on the despatch box and he often looks at them, down and up, down and up, down and up. The Liberal Democrat leader, you stand up with your papers in your hand. You’ve nothing to hold on [to], you’ve no prop.
    And my problem was that I need glasses, so I could only look down with my glasses on. If you look down with your glasses on, the camera shot is … impossible.
    You take the spectacles off and you use them as a prop to make the point. But you have of course to have learned your lines. And there’s a problem [in that] if you’ve learned your lines too much then you become too concentrated on the lines and less on what you’ve got to say.
    In the end I think we got it right, but it took a little while.
    Sir Menzies felt that his leadership was further undermined by Gordon Brown’s unexpected decision not to call an election soon after becoming Prime Minister in 2007. As matters came to a head of steam, with even senior members of the party openly discussing whether it was right for him to hang on, he decided to stand down:
    I was ready for the election. We thought the election would come in the autumn – so did a lot of people.
    One Saturday I spent nine hours in the chair taking the manifesto first through the parliamentary party, then through the federal executive. The helicopters were booked and 75 per cent of the programme was ready. I was ready. And then of course it all came to nothing.
    And at that stage it was clear to me, I’m sixty-six, I was quite clear in my own mind. Like the Grand Old Duke of York, having marched us up to the top of the hill and marched us down again, there was no way that Brown could march us up once more and he would have to go to 2010, by which stage I would be sixty-nine.
    Whereas if