The two of us: Sir Menzies and Lady Elspeth Campbell
The former Lib Dem leader met his wife in a castle on Friday 13 and married three months later
Sir Menzies and Lady Elspeth Campbell on their wedding day
Interview by Helen Stewart
The MP and “occasional writer” Sir Menzies Campbell, 67, met his wife Lady Elspeth, 68, in the late Sir Nicholas Fairbairn’s Fordell Castle on the inauspicious date of Friday, March 13, 1970.
Ming
I was doing a legal case with Nicholas Fairbairn and he told me: “Bring your black tie on Friday, we’re going dancing.” So of course I complied. It was a dance in Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms to raise money for the Traverse Theatre. I’m not sure how Elspeth got her invite.
We met before the dance in front of the fireplace at his castle in Fife. She was wearing a pink and grey dress and was enormously pretty. I don’t think there was any explicit matchmaking going on. Nicholas said to Elspeth afterwards: “I thought you might like him, but I didn’t think you’d marry him.”
At the time Elspeth was doing a bit of journalism on the William Hickey page of the Daily Express, so she was well-known about town. I wouldn’t have described her as an It Girl, not in her presence at least. She was vivacious, vital, witty, beautiful — quite extraordinary.
We got married on June 12 that same year. It seemed right at the time and it still seems right. I was 29, she was 31, had been married before and had a son — we knew our own minds.
You’ve heard the expression “to marry up”? Well, I married up. She was convent-educated, her father was a senior officer in the British army. They lived in Austria at one stage, a huge house, servants, a steam yacht on the lake, two ski instructors at their disposal, their own train . . . that was to live high on the hog in those days. But she is nothing if not adaptable, she relishes change. She’d have to, being with me.
I thought I was going to be an Edinburgh lawyer, we both did, but then I was approached by the Greenock Liberal party to stand. I had been at university with John Smith, Donald Dewar and Derry Irvine, and my parents had been solid Labour voters, but I was more drawn to the Liberals even then. Simpler times, really; there was sport, there was politics and, having concentrated on my athletics, it was time to have a go.
It was very challenging. In 1974 Greenock had 7,000 people working on the ships. It sometimes got quite rough: we had meetings at the shipyard gates and I’d put Elspeth in the car because some of the language was, well, let’s just say it was not what she was used to hearing.
She supported me then as she supports me now — she’s always been a tremendous friend. I had cancer five years ago and Elspeth was absolutely fantastic, driving me to my appointments, physically helping me, emotionally sustaining me. It was a very difficult time. I mean, we’re not special in that regard, a lot of people have to live through it, but I know that without Elspeth it would have been so much harder. That holds true for each area in my life, so I take every opportunity to pay tribute to her.
Elspeth
Of course there was matchmaking going on, and it had the desired effect — I’ll have to talk to Ming about this. Nicky had given him quite the write-up prior to us meeting, all about how this handsome athlete who had run at the Tokyo Olympics was coming. Certainly, the speech I got was enough to make me look twice at Ming . . . well, that and the fact that he was tall, dark and handsome and struck me immediately as a man of the greatest honesty and integrity.
He was good fun, we danced the night away and a few days later he rang up the cottage where I lived with my little boy to ask for a date and things rushed forward from there. I was anxious not to make a mistake, having been married before, so I quickly introduced him to my parents. My father said to me that he was too good to miss.
We moved to Edinburgh — I was dragged kicking and screaming as I thought of myself as a West Coast girl — but we bought a nice flat and started having parties. My son was at boarding school, which is what you did to small boys in those days.
I was happy to be an Edinburgh lawyer’s wife but I landed up being married to a prominent MP and the leader of his party. We said we’d do it together and we did. There is not a more interesting group of people than politicians — Ming has always said I’m more interested in gossip than policy, and he’s right.
It’s pretty frenetic when he’s at home, the telephone never stops. I knock up dinner (Ming is strictly non-domesticated, he wouldn’t know where to start) and we have lots of laughs and talk. He takes the big decisions about whether we should go to war in Iraq, I decide where we should live and what we should eat. We have lots of things in common: the arts, a love of reading, the theatre — I even like sports now. We seldom fight at all. That’s testament to his good nature, because I am capable in that arena.
Ming is a renaissance man. He was the last of the great amateur sportsmen, got three weeks off from his law firm to go to the Olympics. I remember when we first met he had drawers full of prizes. Nowadays he’d have made a fortune. He’s achieved so many things — a top-class athlete, a very fine lawyer, an eminent politician — and all from a tenement flat in Glasgow. He’s done it all himself, and that is worthy of admiration, mine and yours.
Menzies Campbell will appear at the Edinburgh Book Festival at 6.30pm, August 11, at the RBS Main Theatre to talk about his recent autobiography.
