On the night of the general election in 2015, a seasoned observer gleefully told me: “The Lib Dem business model is bust.” Voters dramatically rejected the party’s role in the Cameron-Clegg coalition, leaving it wiped out. The dilemma was immediately apparent: it could take a generation for the number of Liberal Democrat MPs to climb until they could, again, have a role in government. When these heights were reached, they might once more expect to land a few policy wins while being blamed for the larger party’s antics — before being smashed back down. And so on ad infinitum.
Fast forward to a good local elections night a few weeks ago, and the Lib Dem recovery appears strong. They gained more than 400 council seats, many from the Conservatives in the “blue wall” — affluent, small-l liberal or moderate areas where some big Tory names are vulnerable. This led to feverish speculation about a left-of-centre coalition if Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party falls short of an outright majority at the coming election. Far from feeling flattered, though, the Lib Dem party leader Sir Ed Davey seems decidedly wary.
Davey is keen to quash all talk of co-operation: his standard response is: “My job is to win lots of seats: primarily against the Tories.” He has also fought off demands to adopt a more distinctively anti-Brexit message. This risks disappointing supporters — and financial backers — who came in behind the party seeing it as the vehicle for a pro-EU campaign. Donors like the idea of influencing a power-sharing government in that direction, too.
While proud of his role as energy secretary in the coalition, Davey is painfully aware that only 11 seats came the party’s way in 2019 (by-election victories have since helped them creep up to 14). So Team Davey is gradualist. That means no overambitious seat projections or dilution of the strictly targeted ground war that more than doubled the party’s seats to 46 in 1997. Davey is “ruthless” on this, says an insider, focused only on getting the dead-cert winnable Conservative seats in the bag — on a bad night this could mean the high teens; a good night might net 30.
This ruthlessness extends to rejecting calls to be more vocal on Brexit or possible coalitions. The psephologist Sir John Curtice has pored over last month’s results in battleground areas, combined with how people voted in the 2016 referendum and what they now think about it. He is unconvinced: “It’s not obvious what the benefits are at the moment to the Liberal Democrats of staying schtum on Brexit.”
Curtice can track even Rejoiners heading to Labour, despite the main opposition party’s even more extreme caution on the topic. He warns that the Lib Dems, in contrast to Starmer, have little to show for their reticence. And pressure is mounting on Davey as impatient activists, candidates and party grandees see public opinion turn against the decision to leave the EU. Selection hustings are peppered with critiques of “timidity”.
One would-be Lib Dem MP fighting a three-way marginal complains: “We’ve nothing distinctive to say.” With a bolder message on Europe, such hopefuls argue another tranche of seats might be in play. Pretending a deal isn’t at least a possibility is “patronising”, says one. Doubters disagree, maintaining that Davey’s predecessor Jo Swinson’s 2019 promise to “Revoke Article 50” and “Stop Brexit” showed just how badly such ploys can backfire — campaigners say it still comes up from voters who thought it both barmy and anti-democratic.
As for a power-sharing deal with Starmer, Davey’s circle is suspicious of any formal arrangement at all, including a confidence and supply agreement. One veteran of both the Cameron-Clegg years and the Lib-Lab shared government in Scotland sees a halfway house as the worst of all worlds. Opting for a case-by-case negotiation on voting through measures of a minority government is seen as a less politically risky course of action in the event of a hung parliament.
The necessity, as Davey sees it, is to steer clear of the twin topics of coalitions and Brexit, for fear they will go down badly with soft Tories in the commuter-belt seats of the south-east. But there is another serious danger: playing it so safe that voters don’t really know what a Lib Dem vote is for. The current slightly lacklustre answer avoids both putting their ideas into practice in government and reversing the historic decision on EU membership that they opposed so vehemently. It is all dangerously reminiscent of the doomed mountaineers who claimed they wanted to climb Everest simply because it’s there. Reader, they perished on the ice.