Kennedy: we're not nasty like the Tories

There are no nasty groups of people in the Liberal Democrat Party, according to its leader, Charles Kennedy.

His confident announcement that he leads a party of nice people came at the end of a month when the Conservative Party chairman has warned that the Tories are seen as "nasty", and Tony Blair has privately complained that some of the new wave of union leaders remind him of the miners' leader, Arthur Scargill.

Mr Kennedy claimed that he was not put out by unpleasant Westminster rumours about his grip on his job, which culminated in his being asked by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, three days before his wedding, whether he had a drink problem.

Interviewed by The Independent on Sunday, Mr Kennedy brushed that incident off as being no more important than the earlier speculation about why the Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith had a croaky throat. "I don't let that sort of thing get me down. Rumours come and go," he said.

Mr Kennedy is spending today and tomorrow in a hotel in an Oxfordshire village, with about 30 of his front bench spokespeople and senior staff, planning strategy for the coming year.

It is the first time he has indulged in this kind of management bonding course since he took over as party leader, and is a sign that he and his colleagues are taking seriously their long-term ambition to displace the Conservatives as the main opposition party.

Mr Kennedy claimed that even the re-emergence of organised political factions battling for ascendancy in the party is a sign that things are going well.

He confirmed that the party contains a faction known as the Peelite Group, after the 19th-century free market liberal Robert Peel. Its leader is the current party chairman, Mark Oaten. Another is the Beveridge Group, named after one of the founders of the post-1945 welfare state, which wants to protect the Liberal Democrats' reputation as a party willing to spend heavily on public services.

Mr Kennedy said: "There is a spectrum of opinion, and I welcome that. Some people get a little bit nervous, but I keep saying to people 'Yeah, this is real politics, you know' and if we're going to get bigger we're going to have more of that."

He flatly denied that there were any "nasty" factions within the Liberal Democrats, needing to be dealt with because they were harmful to the party in the way that Mr Duncan Smith has barred Tory MPs from belonging to the Monday Club, or Labour once had to rid itself of the Militant Tendency.

The political battle within the Liberal Democrats centres on their decision to abandon a commitment on which they have fought three successive general election, that they would put up income tax to fund spending on education.

After the huge spending increases announced by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, the Liberal Democrats decided to concentrate on whether the money was being spent effectively.

Mr Kennedy hailed Labour's spending increase as a victory for his party, though he accused Labour of having helped give politics a bad name by fighting an election on a promise not to increase taxes and then putting taxes up when they were in power.

Challenged to say in 25 words what the Liberal Democrats stand for, Mr Kennedy used 29: "Consistency of principle when it comes to domestic and international affairs, and a focus on the delivery of public policy, whether it's domestic public policy or international public policy."