The Liberal Democrats: on the march?

“Ed Davey has lost none of his skill at the eye-catching but ultimately vacuous video-opportunity,” said The Independent.

He paraded into the Liberal Democrat annual conference in Bournemouth this weekend at the head of a drummer band, proudly twirling a baton. Yet even if the stunt was cringeworthy, it’s true that the Lib Dems are “on the march”. Having shrunk to a low point of just eight MPs after the 2015 election, the party won 72 seats in last year’s election, the best result by any third party in Britain in a century.

The Lib Dems now control more councils than the Tories do, said Oliver Wright in The Times, and, with polls suggesting that they’re trailing the Conservatives by only two points, the Lib Dems believe they could end up winning more seats than them at the next election. “It’s not a completely implausible scenario.”

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‘The Gail’s strategy’

The Lib Dems owe their recent success partly to a more focused electoral strategy, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. In the 1992 election, they won almost one in five votes, but only 20 seats. Last year, Davey’s tactic of targeting prosperous Tory constituencies – nicknamed the “Gail’s strategy” because of the popularity of the high-end bakery chain in such areas – won them 72 MPs with the support of only one in eight voters.

The party’s plan now seems to be “to sit tight, play it safe, and seek to pick up more seats” from the two stricken main parties. “But is this really sufficient?” One can’t help feeling that in this tumultuous era of populism, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party dominating political debate, the Liberal Democrats are failing to meet the moment and offer a proper defence of “liberalism and democracy”.

‘Profile-raising stunts’

For all Davey’s much-mocked stunts, only 37% of people were able to identify him from a photo in a recent survey, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. But he has had some success in raising his profile by speaking out on issues that other leaders prefer to avoid. For instance, he said he would not be attending the recent state banquet for Donald Trump, in protest at the treatment of the people of Gaza. Such statements go down well with Lib Dem activists, who “skew left”.

At the same time, though, Davey has attacked Labour for imposing VAT on private school fees and removing inheritance tax relief from farms, a stance that puts him to the right of the Government. This attempt to peel off centre-right voters is risky: it could exacerbate the existing “tension between the kind of party the Lib Dems are and the kind of seats they aspire to hold or already do”.