It can be a struggle to take Ed Davey seriously. The Liberal Democrat leader’s choice of arriving at his party’s seaside conference via jet ski reminded me of Jeremy Thorpe’s ill-fated attempt to tour Britain by hovercraft. The heir of William Gladstone and David Lloyd George devotes as much attention to publicity stunts as his predecessors (respectively) once gave to redeeming prostitutes and wooing secretaries.
Paddle-boarding, bungee-jumps, children’s slides: whatever it takes to get Davey attention, he is game (if it doesn’t involve meeting any aggrieved postmasters). Yet the most depressing aspect of his pursuit of personal humiliation is that it seemed to work. The Liberal Democrats gained 61 seats on July 4, leaving them with 72, making Davey the most successful Liberal leader since Herbert Henry Asquith.
He bestrides Brighton as a conquering hero, having found the crown of Swinson in the electoral gutter. As a Conservative, I am conscious that this success came overwhelmingly at our expense. All but two of their gains came from taking previous Tory redoubts. Stratford-on-Avon, Tunbridge Wells, Surrey Heath, and more – once strongholds of Conservative England, now turned Liberal yellow.
Davey brought the ‘Blue Wall’ tumbling down with a thud reminiscent of Jericho. Yet today he will tell his assembled devotees that this task is incomplete. 39 out of their top 50 target seats are still held by the Tories. Although he may not spell out his intentions explicitly, those attending the party’s annual jamboree will dream of supplanting the Conservatives as His Majesty’s Official Opposition.
Wishful thinking? Not at all. After their disastrous return at the 2019 election, the Liberal Democrats rebuilt their campaign machine from the ground up. For all their ancestral hatred for first-past-the-post, the party worked out how to ruthlessly exploit our electoral system, bombarding targets with uber-focused campaign messages: the state of local services, sewage in rivers, and enthusiastic Nimbyism.
This might all amount to what John Oxley has labelled ‘middle-class populism’: a warm and unthreatening embrace to the fed-up denizens of the Tory shires. With a foot in the door, they now hope to embed themselves once again as permanent fixtures of the political landscape. Having doubled their seats in 1997, the Liberal Democrats benefitted from a huge incumbency effect in 2001.
If Davey’s new disciples can replicate this, any potential Tory revival will be hobbled. Their reputation as the electoral equivalent of Japanese knotweed is well-earnt. Their average majority in seats they held in 2019 is now 16,000. New Liberal Democrat MPs have been instructed to return to their constituencies and prepare to trudge through case work. Not a single school fete shall go unattended.
If the Conservatives cannot win back seats like Witney, Maidenhead, and Henley – previously held, at one time or another, by David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson – it is moribund. Whatever the travails of Keir Starmer’s abysmal administration, with Reform UK snapping at Tory heels, the path to becoming the largest party, let alone winning a majority, looks almost insurmountable.
Nonetheless, a path to curing the Yellow Peril does exist. On a local level, this partially relies on using the dark arts of the Liberal Democrats against them: selecting candidates early, ruthlessly focusing resources, and telling local voters exactly what they want to hear, whatever the national line. The Town and Country Planning Act must be destroyed, but, in the meantime, it must be exploited.
The Tories must also capitalise on an error of Davey’s judgement. He is a self-declared man of the centre-left, and will aim to outflank Labour accordingly. Offering a so-called ‘constructive opposition’, this manifests itself as demands for more spending – whether on the NHS, winter fuel payments, or the two-child limit – alongside the usual and irrepressible hunger to get close to the EU whenever possible.
Having returned the SNP to its rightful place, Davey now has two questions at PMQs with which to sketch out the Liberal Democrat weltgeist of ever-more spending on various high-minded causes. He might not have to work out where to find the money for match his principles. But what will outraged of Tunbridge Wells think, when the bill starts to come in for the Starmer-Davey axis of expenditure?
Unfortunately for Davey, even if his new constituencies used the Liberal Democrats, in a fit of pique, as a blunt instrument with which to turf the Tories out, their outlooks are still solidly right-wing. Attitude surveys suggest many want a smaller state, lower taxes, and reduced immigration. Many voted to Leave. If Davey hopes they are coming around to bourgeois progressivism, he is barking up the wrong tree.
Rachel Reeves has already stripped Middle England of its fuel payments. Now she is homing in on school fees and planning a Budget targeting inheritances and pensions. These will squeeze exactly the sorts of comfortable Southern voters the Liberal Democrats now represent en masse. Whatever Davey’s social democratic instincts, playing the voice of middle-class anguish means tracking rightwards.
Calling for more spending while damning efforts to pay for it would be classic Liberal Democrat behaviour. But as a Labour government that came to office unpopular becomes ever-more so, the question will be raised of just how much support Davey is willing to give Starmer. With so many small majorities, not too great a swing could produce a hung parliament at the next election.
It is widely accepted that the Liberal Democrats would try to avoid working with the Conservatives. Memories of the disastrous ending to the Coalition are still too fresh. A vote for Davey is therefore, in effect, a vote for Starmer. Any Tory campaign at the next election should hammer this home. However popular your local MP is, if you want Labour out, you cannot vote Liberal Democrat.
Since they rely on being all things to all men, Davey’s party always suffers when forced to pick a side. Both their decision to go into government with the Conservatives and to go all-in on reversing Brexit alienated them from a large chunk of potential voters. Their success this time has relied on being a bland enough vehicle for the protest votes of fed-up Home Counties Tories. That can soon change.
If he hitches his party too closely to Labour’s tainted brand, Davey could be dragged down with them. No Conservative should doubt that winning back those dozens of lost seats will be at all easy. But it will involve something which shouldn’t be too unfamiliar for your average Tory: reminding their natural voters that, however underwhelming we can be in government, Labour are always worse.
Of course, just because many of those voters were once Conservatives does not mean that they must be again. The next Tory leader cannot rely only on their opponents’ unpopularity. They must show why we can be trusted more than the Liberal Democrats, Reform, or anyone else as the outlet for Middle England’s anxieties. Like the Liberals a century ago, we have no divine right to major party status.
Tunbridge Wells, je vous ai compris. If constituencies where the Conservative vote should be weighed opted for the paddle-boarding clown over Rishi Sunak, it is a sign of just how much they feel Sunak let them down. Until the Tories accept, understand, and act on that, they do not deserve those seats back. I looked, and beheld a pale jet ski, and the name that sat on him was Davey, and hell followed with him.
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