IF Charles Kennedy had lived, he would be in his 62nd year. You therefore have to be of a certain age to remember the circumstances in which he became an MP and how bright a star he was.

BBC Alba’s documentary has revived discussion around the closing months of his career and, as it proved, his life. It is good that it has done so since these circumstances were so egregious as to demand recall, not least in order to inconvenience those who would prefer us to forget.

By the time of his defeat in 2015, Charles had been an MP for 32 years. That is a long shift in permanent opposition. It should certainly act as a warning against going into politics too young without any other experience of the world to fall back on.

Yet Charles’s route into Parliament was different to the career-driven path planned out by today’s identikit special advisers and apparatchiks. He arrived in the House of Commons pretty much by accident and certainly against expectation, amidst the Tory landslide of 1983.

READ ALISON ROWAT: Film reopens row over Charles Kennedy’s last electoral battle

Charles was the classic example of what a Scottish state education could deliver – clever, skilled in debating and with a good sense of his own worth. Yet also grounded in a rich environment of family and culture which shaped egalitarian values and gifted him the common political touch.

There was lovely footage of a house ceilidh in Lochaber. His dad was a renowned fiddler and Charles grew up with music around him. Many years later, when the great accordionist, Fergie Macdonald, was marking his 70th birthday, four politicians who knew him were asked to contribute to a brochure which accompanied the celebratory event in Glasgow.

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We all wrote decent pieces but the one that shone out was by Charles for this was the world from which he came. By then, his problems were public and I found it poignant at the time that so much empathy showed through for the roots from which politics had plucked him. Perhaps this was always the real Charles Kennedy.

Not that anybody was thinking that way in 1983 when he snatched Ross, Cromarty and Skye from the Tories, off the back of the Invergordon smelter closure, became the UK’s youngest MP at 23 and quickly emerged as a television natural, always good for a laugh as well as a political insight.

As the programme recalled, the election was won through a campaign based on personality as well as political debate and culminated in packed eve-of-poll meetings in Dingwall Town Hall. It was electoral democracy in action and, as it happens, the antithesis of our forthcoming Holyrood elections, when absolutely none of it will be possible.

His sociability and an excess of opportunities led Charles into the drinking culture which gave way to alcoholism. I remember, early in his leadership of the Liberal Democrats, a senior figure in that party complaining privately that he had developed ‘the Highland problem’ which seemed a bit unfair to the Highlands.

Alcoholism knows no boundaries of geography, profession or class. The political world offers its particular pitfalls which include the limitless availability of hospitality combined with long hours and absence from a home environment. As the years rolled by, Charles became a prime candidate – but at what point is a line crossed?

A lot of effort went into concealing the scale of his difficulties but in the long run that was a dubious kindness. As Alistair Campbell says in the programme, maybe it would have been better if he had been more open earlier – and certainly before he became a party leader, with all the increased focus this was bound to bring.

Many families in the Highlands, like anywhere else, have been touched by alcoholism and this creates its own non-judgmental understanding and support. That is what made the last campaign against Charles Kennedy so utterly un-Scottish and even more incomprehensible because it was entirely unnecessary.

The 2014 referendum changed the fault lines of Scottish politics. While the 44.7 per cent vote for independence was not enough to secure its objective, when it held firm as a voting bloc it was enough to achieve an almost clean sweep in elections. That is the rut in which we remain stuck, perhaps indefinitely.

When Ian Blackford became SNP candidate in Ross, Cromarty and Skye in January 2015, he was accordingly predestined to win the seat in the forthcoming election. He could have stayed in Edinburgh as a merchant banker rather than metamorphosing into a Skye crofter without much damaging his prospects. Such was the mood of the times.

But the courtesies of politics and civilised debate had been overtaken by a new viciousness. Once the defining line of difference became almost exclusively about the constitution, anything went. For a faction of activists, no blow was too low to strike, so long as it could be done in Scotland’s name.

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I hope the programme is widely watched as a reminder not only of times past but also a warning against times yet to come. (Incidentally, the fact it is partly in Gaelic, with sub-titles, should not be a barrier to it and others of similar quality being repeated on more widely-viewed channels).

Perhaps there could also be an annual Charles Kennedy debate around the question: “Stand Scottish politics where they did?” – with the recent electoral history of Ross, Cromarty and Skye as starting point.

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