Kennedy moves to silence critics on fitness

CHARLES Kennedy moved last night to try to silence the critics who have questioned his fitness to lead his party.

The Liberal Democrat leader appeared on television to insist he had been suffering from a stomach bug and would be back to full fitness soon.

He did admit, however, he needed to "restore" his health and he said he would be using the forthcoming Easter recess to "take to the hills" in a bid to aid his recovery.

Mr Kennedy will face a tough test today when he addresses the Scottish Liberal Democrat conference in Dundee. He knows that anything less than a rousing and confident performance will fuel rumours about the state of his health.

Today’s speech will be his first major public performance since he appeared at his party’s spring conference in Southport last week shaking, pale and dripping with sweat.

His gaunt and uncomfortable appearance shocked many in his party and led to calls that he should undergo a full medical examination. However, Mr Kennedy said last night: "Obviously I had a setback last week of a fairly severe kind, for which I had to take myself off to bed for several days."

He told BBC News 24: "That is not something I want to see repeated.

"It wasn’t very pleasant for me and it certainly wasn’t very useful for the party.

"There is no doubt that I want to restore my health to where I’d like to see it being at and the recess is a good chance to do that. I am going to take to the hills in the literal sense of the words."

He was given a boost yesterday by Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesman, who said that Mr Kennedy was recovering quickly from what had been a "very debilitating" stomach bug.

"He looks entirely different," Sir Menzies told a Parliamentary Press Gallery lunch.

But he said the party could have done without the last week, in which the speculation surrounding Mr Kennedy’s illness had overshadowed and obscured the messages of the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Southport.

"We shall make sure those messages are properly promoted," he said.

Questioned further about the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in the wake of Mr Kennedy’s illness, he said: "There is no vacancy and I don’t think you should consider applications for something when there is no vacancy."

This weekend’s Scottish Liberal Democrat conference will also give Jim Wallace the chance to develop his ideas on a new Scottish Constitutional Convention to give the parliament more powers.

The conference will debate the issue of fiscal autonomy, and although Mr Wallace will not take part in the debate, he has made it clear he wants to see movement on this issue.

Mr Wallace, the deputy first minister, had previously insisted that he did not want to open up the issue of more powers for the parliament until it had been given time to "bed down", but he clearly now believes that it has had enough time to settle down and he wants to change it.

He said last night that he wanted to see the Scottish Constitutional Convention - which paved the way for devolution - reconvened to look at giving more powers to the Scottish Parliament.

But Mr Wallace stressed that he did not expect to see any changes introduced before 2009, the tenth anniversary of the parliament’s birth.

If the Liberal Democrats were to campaign hard on the issue of more powers for the parliament, it would put them in conflict with Labour, particularly if the parties were looking to form a new coalition government.

But Mr Wallace appeared sanguine about that, suggesting that it might be difficult to form a coalition if his party succeeded in its ambition to overtake the SNP as Scotland’s second party.

"If we became the second largest party, we would have to examine what route that would take us down," he said.