Personal Life
In July 2002, Kennedy married Sarah Gurling, the sister of his friend, James Gurling.
Reports of Kennedy's ill-health in 2003 at the time of crucial debates on Iraq and after the 2004 budget (his ill health meant he missed an entire budget speech) were linked to the rumours of alcoholism, strenuously denied by him and the party but he subsequently admitted the rumours.
In April 2005, the launch of his party's manifesto for the General Election was delayed due to the birth of his first child, with Sir Menzies Campbell taking temporary charge as acting leader and covering Kennedy's campaign duties. During the manifesto launch, on his first day back on the campaign trail after the birth, Kennedy struggled to remember the details of a key policy (replacing the council tax with a local income tax) at an early morning press conference, which he later blamed on a lack of sleep due to his new child.
In July 2007, Kennedy was informally spoken to by the British Transport Police after he breached the smoking ban in England on a train.
On 9 August 2010, it was announced that Kennedy and his wife were to separate. Their divorce was granted on 9 December 2010.
Read more about this topic: Charles Kennedy
Famous quotes related to personal life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)