‘HULLO. I’m Charles, Charles Kennedy.” There was a cheeky ginger grin, an outthrust hand and, for at least the next five minutes, the feeling that you were the most interesting person in the world. And for him, you probably were.

I watched the Charles, Charles charm work on people, the grumpy and the garrulous, the lost and the frankly loony, over a few months at what was once called Radio Highland. And that was what Charles Kennedy, who died at his Lochaber home on Monday night, had that very few, if any, of his political contemporaries possessed.

Kennedy won the Observer Mace for debating, while still a student; he was the youngest MP elected from a British mainland constituency in the 20th Century; he courageously stood against ferocious Westminster pressure to oppose the UK’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq; and he led his party to its best ever parliamentary performance in modern times.

I first knew him as a young, endlessly enthusiastic would-be journalist, when he finished university and came to work for a summer at the BBC’s Radio Highland in Inverness, where I was then the senior producer. He was a star.

Indeed, I might well have deprived politics of Charles Kennedy at the end of that summer. I tried to persuade him that his future lay in broadcasting. I offered to pay him out of the petty cash until a real, official, job became vacant and I definitely had him going. He asked for the night to think about it, only to come back and turn me down the following day.

He was due to go to the US on a Fullbright scholarship and it was a chance, he said, he couldn’t really pass up. The rest is Highland history. Within months, he was called back to be adopted as the Social Democratic Party candidate for the Ross and Cromarty constituency. And a few months later, he had unhorsed Conservative Hamish Gray, a Government minister responsible for energy, at a time when North Sea Oil was creating thousands of jobs in his constituency.

I still remember his tale of watching the State Opening of Parliament from behind Ian Paisley’s head. He had many stories and he loved his life and his job. We had many social occasions together, some lubricated, some not. I’ll come back to that.

But Charlie, a man who never pushed himself forward, somehow rose, possibly against his own expectations, to all the places he probably dreamed about back in those days at Radio Highland, though some of those places may not have turned out the way he’d dreamed them.

Election by election, he increased his majority and year by year, he increased his influence on UK politics.

His finest hour was probably his principled and thought-out opposition to the Iraq war, when the Liberal Democrats were to be found to the left of Blair’s New Labour – and on more than just that one issue. That was Charles Kennedy’s doing, and possibly his undoing.

There was a whispering campaign within his own party, about Charlie’s problems and it led to his downfall. Senior figures within his own party were determined to move the party to the right where the votes were supposed to be. And in the end, his battle with the bottle meant he had to face the media and announce his resignation. And his problem.

That made many of us in his Highland heartland very angry. But it’s a measure of the man that Charlie never visibly held a grudge and answered the call when he was asked to help lead the No campaign in the referendum debate. A lifelong believer in Home Rule, he was always going to oppose taking one step further.

At May’s election he was carried away in an SNP surge. At the previous election, he had won more than 60 per cent of the votes cast. But he knew it was coming. Just a couple of weeks before he told me in an off-the-record conversation how people had been coming up to him and apologising to him, because they couldn’t bring themselves to vote LibDem again.

The irony is, of course, that that was all about the party’s decision to join the coalition with the Tories, a betrayal for many who counted themselves in the radical tradition of Highland Liberal Democrats. And Charles Kennedy was the one Liberal Democrat who stood out against that decision by one of his successors. But the surge claimed him too, and for many of us, that was the most astounding result of this year’s election.

So why was Charles Kennedy so popular and so loved, both in his own Highland heartland and further afield? Why have so many people paid tribute to him, both in his own party and from very different political standpoints, from Blair’s spinmeister Alistair Campbell – “Charles Kennedy was a lovely man... I mean it with all my heart” – to SNP leaders past and present?

Perhaps because of that Charles, Charles charm. Perhaps he spoke “human”. Because at the end people trusted him to be straight with them. And because he made politics a better place.

Undoubtedly, a lot of what he was came from his Highland background. Even his faults and foibles were Highland.

And his courage in owning up to one of those problems marked him out as a brave man. He had so much more to give.

I have mourned old friends before. But few will be missed as much as Charles, Charles. And his double helping of charm.

Iain MacDonald worked with Kennedy at Radio Highland before he became an MP