In the end, Sir Menzies Campbell—known to all but his tax inspector as Ming—slipped away at 84, as if the finish line had finally hove into view after a lifetime of false starts. Born Walter Menzies in a Glasgow tenement on a rare night when the Luftwaffe took the evening off, he emerged from those cramped stairs not with a chip on his shoulder, but with the lithe determination of a man who'd already clocked the world at a sprint. By 19, he'd shattered the UK 100-metre record, and off to Tokyo '64 he went, an Olympic relay runner whose baton-passing skills would later serve him well in the hand-me-down chaos of coalition politics. One imagines the young Ming, all gangly limbs and Glasgow grit, eyeing the starting blocks and thinking: "This is quicker than debating devolution."
Ah, but politics—that great British steeplechase where the hurdles are mostly invisible and the prizes illusory—claimed him next. Called to the Scots Bar in 1968, he traded spikes for silk gowns, only to vault into Parliament in 1987 as the Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife. For three decades, he held that Fife fastness with the steady grip of a man who'd once outrun the wind, dispensing urbane wisdom laced with a dry wit that could curdle milk. As foreign affairs spokesman, he skewered ministers with questions sharp as a stiletto; as party leader in 2006, he lasted just 19 months before the inevitable reshuffle. "Too old at 66," the whispers went, as if longevity were a vice in a game of musical Westminster chairs.
His personal lane was a quieter dash, paced by the unhurried elegance of a marriage that outlasted most governments. In 1970, mere weeks after locking eyes across a crowded room—or so the romantic revisionists would have it—he wed Elspeth Grant-Suttie, daughter of the redoubtable Major-General Roy Urquhart, whose Arnhem heroics made family dinners sound like dispatches from a Monty Python sketch on war. No brood of their own graced the starting blocks, but Ming embraced Elspeth's son from a prior union as his own, forging a stepfather's bond that proved family, like liberty, needs no bloodlines to thrive. When Elspeth passed in 2023, after fifty-three years of shared sprints and stumbles, Ming's tribute rang with the quiet thunder of a man who'd learned that the truest relays are the heart's, not the track's.
Beneath the grandee sheen—the Savile Row suits, the clipped vowels hiding a tenement twang—lurked a warmth that thawed even the frostiest dispatch box. He championed human rights with the fervour of a man who'd seen speed as freedom, and in the Lords as Baron Campbell of Pittenweem, he remained a voice for the overlooked, proving that true pace comes not from legs, but from legacy. Ming didn't just run; he lapped the field, leaving us all a lap behind, chuckling at our plodding ways.