Conflicting political ambitions within the embattled Labour Party ranks may have cost it a chance of forming a leadership coalition following last month’s election result, according to the former Liberal Democrat leader the Rt Hon Sir Menzies Campbell.

The veteran politician has told how he and other senior Lib Dems held last-minute talks with Gordon Brown in an attempt to explore the possibilities of establishing a Labour/Liberal pairing.

In a candid interview with Holyrood, the MP for North East Fife also said it may have been bad timing rather than a lack of political will that called time on Brown’s troubled leadership.

He said: “It’s no secret that I was arguing right up until the moment of the decision that we needed to explore what Labour could offer. I am part of the succession which goes back to Grimond, Steel, Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Ashdown and mirrored on the other side by Blair that the political realignment would come from the left and that there would eventually be a prospect of a non-doctrinaire, centre-left party.

“It’s a compromise and to some extent, my judgement was made easier because I spoke to Gordon over that weekend, as he spoke to Vince Cable and others, and I am quite certain in my own mind that he was anxious to find an arrangement but I am equally certain that within his own party, and for quite legitimate reasons, there were people saying, ‘we got beat and we need to go back and think about what we are going to do for the future’ and there were others thinking already about the leadership election and others who just don’t like the Liberal Democrats and didn’t want to enter into any kind of an arrangement with us and it would have been hellish difficult to deal with so in my view, Gordon acted in good faith but in the end the Tories just outbid Labour.”

Campbell, who said he has still not received a call from Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, believes that the downfall of Brown may have been down to timing.

He added: “If Labour had stuck to its personal freedom and individual liberty agenda and Blair had not been the architect of 42-day detention then things may have been different and Gordon neither had the time nor inclination to make much difference to that.

“He was stuck with Afghanistan and the tail end of Iraq but what is interesting is that in July 2007, shortly after he became PM, he made a statement to the Commons about all the constitutional change he was going to make and it just disappeared, to be fair, under the weight of the economic problems, but that agenda was all stuff like fixed-term parliaments,  AV, elected House of Lords, bigger, better, wider FOI, all classic liberal stuff but either by lack of inclination or opportunity he never put it into operation. So now we have what we have.”

Read the full interview in the new issue of Holyrood, out Monday.