Is Ed Davey Holding the Liberal Democrats Back?
17/07/25
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ED DAVEY, LEADER OF THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, AT PRIME MINISTER'S QUESTIONS, IMAGE: HOUSE OF COMMONS
One of the enduring images of the 2024 UK General Election campaign was of Sir Ed Davey’s campaign antics, which helped the Liberal Democrats break through for the first time since the Clegg years, ending ten years of near political irrelevance and winning the most seats of any third party since the Liberals in 1923. However, if the Party wishes to make further electoral progress and capitalise on the increasingly fractionalised political system, it will need to professionalise its campaign methods. And that will mean taking off the rose-tinted glasses in their assessment of their leader.
When Davey won the leadership of the Party in the summer of 2020, the Liberal Democrats were reeling from yet another disappointing set of election results. After much promise during the Brexit chaos of 2019 that the Party could make electoral inroads, the largest pro-Remain Party ended up losing a parliamentary seat from its 2017 tally, that seat being its leader, Jo Swinson's. And with Johnson’s Tories looking as if they were going to dominate British Politics for the foreseeable future, potentially for the next decade, the Lib Dems needed to change their methods if they were to make an electoral breakthrough.
After a sizable by-election victory in Chesham and Amersham in June 2021, a seat held by the Tories since it was created in February 1974, the first glimpse of Davey’s stunt-like approach to publicity was seen when, with an orange hammer, he began to dismantle a blue wall of plastic bricks. Little did we know at the time that this would be a metaphor of things to come.
More by-election victories followed, in North Shropshire following the Owen Patterson scandal and in Tiverton and Honiton in June 2022, the seat of Neil Parish, the Tory MP who had been forced to resign after admitting to accessing pornography in the House of Commons chamber. But again, many political commentators could not help but think these were mid-term protest votes – fuelled by the public’s anger at the scandals the Conservative Party were implicated in. However, following the Liz Truss debacle and Rishi Sunak's inability to turn the Tory ship around, it became clear that the Lib Dems posed a real threat to the Conservative Party in their southern heartlands at the forthcoming election.
In the pouring rain outside 10 Downing Street on May 22nd 2024, Rishi Sunak called the long-anticipated General Election. The following week, following the dissolution of Parliament, the campaign began in earnest. The first of Davey’s stunts would be him paddleboarding alongside his predecessor, Tim Farron, on Lake Windermere. This was an attempt to highlight the sewage spill crisis; however, the stunt was somewhat undermined by Davey deliberately (and somewhat comedically) falling into the lake on several occasions. These stunts just kept coming over the following five weeks – whether it be bungee jumping, conducting interviews on the teacups at Thorpe Park at his Party’s manifesto launch or going down waterslides at a water park in the Conservative-Lib Dem battleground of Somerset.
DAVEY TAKES A TUMBLE INTO LAKE WINDERMERE, IMAGE: THE INDEPENDENT
The result of these eye-catching stunts was undoubtedly successful. The Lib Dems won 72 seats, including the scalps of Cabinet Ministers Gillian Keegan, Alex Chalk, and Michelle Donelan. However, they were unable to unseat the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in Godalming and Ash, who unexpectedly clung on in an otherwise faultless display for the Party, as it returned to being the 3rd largest party in the Commons for the first time since the SNP landslide of 2015.
With such a strong electoral performance, why should the Lib Dems stop with these campaign antics and professionalise their methods, even if that means replacing Davey with a younger, more sensible, though equally as charismatic leader?
The truth is, the Lib Dems could be polling better than they currently are. The antics were good enough to achieve an electoral breakthrough, but if the Lib Dems want to take the next step and capitalise on the fractionalisation the UK political system is presently experiencing, they must start to change their ways, particularly if they want to cement the title they desire – being the party of ‘Middle England’.
Davey’s tomfoolery is presently deterring this desired voter coalition. Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart is an example of the very voters being deterred by Davey’s campaign methods whom the Party could attract. He recently stated on an episode of The Rest Is Politics that he is becoming more Liberal Democrat on policy, but simply cannot get past the unseriousness of Davey’s leadership style. This is clear evidence of the downside of this campaign strategy, which is that it distracts from and undermines what the Party stands for. It overshadows the policy messages the Lib Dems should be aiming to convey to potential voters.
If the Lib Dems are to win over people like Stewart, as well as similar-minded disgruntled, Remain-voting, The Times-reading, lifelong Tory voters, they will need to professionalise as this lucrative voter coalition is looking for a serious and credible set of policies to support being espoused by an equally serious leader, not a leader running around on a hobby horse in the middle of a local election campaign. Without doing so, the Lib Dems will struggle to move past the 80 or 90 seats they appear to be stalled on in recent MRP seat forecast polling, and it will also give the Conservative Party more time and less pressure to come up with a policy base to try and maintain this part of their traditional voter coalition.
If Davey refuses to professionalise his campaign style, or if the Party comes to the conclusion that Davey is holding them back from making further electoral progress, it could be decided that they are better off under new leadership, which would likely be Daisy Cooper, who I think the major Parties would fear more than Davey. She would likely attract more left-of-centre voters, dissatisfied with the actions of the Starmer government as well as those disgruntled one-nation Conservatives, unhappy with the direction the Party has gone over recent years. Tapping into this broad potential voter coalition could make the Liberal Democrats a more significant player in the increasingly volatile UK party system.
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