It’s become commonplace for people writing about the loss of our leader last autumn to refer casually to “the Lib Dems ditching Ming Campbell as Leader because he was too old”.

This is fast becoming accepted as the official history of what happened at the start of October 2007.

But in fact this is not what happened.

Yes, Ming was forced into a position where he felt he had to resign because there was a perception that he was too old.

But who was it who made this into an issue?

I don’t think I met any Lib Dem members - certainly not a significant number - who actually themselves believed that Ming was too old to lead the party. Nobody - at least in my hearing - said that you simply can’t have a 66 year-old leading a major party.

What Lib Dem members did say, in common with many others, is that the fact that he was seen as too old, was a barrier to him communicating anything else and in leading the party - and in the end became such a problem that he felt he had to go.

If there is one group of people who bear more responsibility for this perception than anyone else, it is the media. It is they who made this such an issue, and returned to it so repeatedly, that it became the barrier it did. I accept it was not only the media, some of the public reached the same conclusion, and Ming was not helped by the fact that he looked much older on television than he does in real life (much in the same way that the camera is simply not kind to Cherie Blair’s appearance).

But it is the media who, as Ming said in his resignation interview with Nick Robinson, wrote a different story about Ming being too old for the job in each of his last seven days in the post.

That being the situation, he himself reached quickly the conclusion that others in the party were also reaching more slowly, that whatever the reality of his age, the perception of it created by others was becoming such an obstacle that it made it all but impossible to get any other message across. He therefore did the highly honourable and difficult thing, and went.

But the idea that he went because, either immediately or over a period of time, other Lib Dems forced him, is quite wrong. He saw the way things were going, and did the honourable thing.

As he said at the time he resigned - not one single Liberal Democrat had come to him and said that “you must go”. It was not Liberal Democrats who made him go.