Alan Watkins: Now is the time for Charlie to cut and run

At the beginning of his political career, Mr Charles Kennedy was canvassing a doctor in the Western Highlands, who assumed he was the representative of a drugs company. He was shocked by the amount Mr Kennedy smoked. When the true position became clear, the doctor considered him a pleasant enough young man – he would then have been 23 – but continued to vote Tory.

At the election numerous Tories further south formed the same opinion of Mr Kennedy, nearly 20 years older but still, by political standards, young. They went on to vote Liberal Democrat in substantial numbers. The party ended up with 52 seats, five more than it had held at the dissolution, and six more than Sir (as he then wasn't) Paddy Ashdown had hauled in at the previous election, for in the meantime the party had won the Romsey by-election.

This, indeed, had been the beginning not so much of the Liberal Democrat revival as of Mr Kennedy's rehabilitation. Before that contest the members of the higher command, who are no more loyal to the leader or to one another than they are in larger parties, were asking: have we all made a terrible mistake? They could have had the hyperactive Mr Simon Hughes or the statesmanlike Mr Menzies Campbell, whose acres of pinstriped suiting and sheets of fine cotton shirting would not have looked out of place on a Tory frontbencher of the 1950s.

Mr Campbell, who was once described as the fastest white man in the world, would probably have won the leadership too if he had been prepared to enter this particular race with Mr Kennedy, Mr Hughes, Mr Malcolm Bruce, Ms Jackie Ballard and Mr David Rendel. Instead he virtually demanded a guarantee that the job would be his. At all events, in the postal play-off Mr Kennedy defeated Mr Hughes by 57 per cent of the members to 43 per cent.

Till Romsey, Mr Kennedy was accused of the usual offences: he was too idle (in modern politicospeak "unfocused''), too fond of the odd wee dram, too lightweight, at any rate metaphorically, for, oddly perhaps, his aptitude at game shows of one sort or another was held to be a disadvantage rather than an asset. The sobriquet "Chatshow Charlie'' was not coined by the lobby or the press gallery but by his fellow-Liberals, as they used to call themselves at the old Liberal assembly.

His worst crime of all was not to be Sir Paddy, now getting into an aeroplane, now getting out of one, and duly reporting his conclusions on the state of the Balkans, or whichever troubled part of the globe it might be, to the House of Commons or anybody else who was prepared to listen. The Romsey result stilled these complaints about Mr Kennedy. But it did not stifle them completely. From time to time little puffs of doubt would emerge and float upwards. The question was: how would Charlie cope with a general election campaign, with the scurrying hither and yon, the need to stick meticulously to the script, the premium placed on zip, drive, vim and, in the last resort, sheer physical fitness? Well, as we know now, Charlie did not cope adequately so much as magnificently. He will go to Bournemouth for the conference (the word "assembly'' was jettisoned in 1988) as master of all he surveys, even including such troublesome and ambitious characters as Mr Hughes. There is not a rival in sight. He can do as he likes, for a time, at any rate – which in practice means two or three years in situations of this kind.

Since the election Mr Kennedy has lain low and kept quiet. Why should he have done anything else? The publicity for the Government has been poor and, for the Conservatives, disastrous. Yet Mr Kennedy knows that by the end of September he will have been constrained to make up his mind about a specific question. To what extent, if at all, is he prepared to co-operate with the Government? The smoke signals from party headquarters are to the effect that co-operation is at an end and that all bets are off. If these signs are correct, he has already made the right decision.

The pre-1997 flirtation between Sir Paddy and Mr Tony Blair was predicated on a much lower Labour majority. The Liberal Democrats would assist Labour in the lobbies and elsewhere. In return the smaller party would be vouchsafed a glimpse of the tantalising black suspenders of power on cabinet committees and the like. The party might even find itself the recipient of a post in the Cabinet, taken by Sir Paddy. This would inevitably lead in time to the merger of the parties and the Promised Land of one radical party as outlined by Roy Jenkins and, before him, by Jo Grimond.

The 1997 election changed all that. The only sensible reason for the Liberal Democrats to attach themselves to Mr Blair was to secure electoral reform in return. As an inquirer into this subject the Prime Minister duly appointed Lord Jenkins, who produced an elegant report persuasively arguing for the alternative vote with a top-up element short of full proportionality. Nothing happened. Mr Blair broke his promise, not to introduce electoral reform, but to hold a referendum on whether it should be introduced or not.

Today the prospects for such a reform are as slender as they were at any time during the last Parliament. True, one of its supporters, Mr Robin Cook, is Leader of the House. But another supporter, Mr Peter Mandelson, is now outside the Government. Moreover, Mr Blair will be anxious to ingratiate himself with the Old Labour element on his back benches where he can afford to as a harmless gesture. If there is one thing that infuriates the keepers of the cloth cap more than co-operation with the Liberals generally, it is electoral reform specifically.

There is another reason for Mr Kennedy to proclaim his independence in September. It is that, in the present state of politics, the Liberal Democrats are the alternative to the Conservatives rather than to Labour, which, trading as the Alliance, is what they were in 1981–87. This does not mean that they have to soften their attacks on the Tories. On the contrary: it has always seemed to me illogical to conclude that, if the Liberal Democrats attack the Conservatives, they are accordingly playing Labour's game. They may equally well be playing their own game of attacking the Tories in the hope of displacing them as the second party.

This is no longer unrealistic. If a party has won Guildford from the Conservatives and Chesterfield from Labour, as the Liberal Democrats did in June, anything can happen. Or this, at least, is what Mr Kennedy must tell his troops at Bournemouth.