Ed Davey tasked with bringing the Lib Dems back from the dead

The Liberal Democrat leadership contest was supposed to be an opportunity for the beleaguered party to gain national prominence and capture the imagination of the public. But as two candidates battled over the future of Britain’s third national party, few people noticed. Their debates dragged on for twelve weeks, and very few voters seemed to care.

Layla Moran, a pansexual science geek, promised to lighten up the race with a radical approach to liberalism. It worked at first – she gained more media coverage than the frontrunner – but her candidacy quickly descended into farce when stories re-emerged of the time she assaulted her boyfriend at a party conference, as well as her subsequent relationship with a Lib Dem staffer. More recently, her policy proposals have gone off the tracks, including a suggestion this morning that the voting franchise could be extended to eleven year olds.

It therefore came as little surprise that her opponent, Sir Edward Davey, won the contest today with a resounding 63.5% of the vote, in a victory for the status quo. Davey, who has already been interim leader since the December general election, promised in his acceptance speech to “travel up and down the country to meet you, to hear about things that matter most to you: your problems and fears, your hopes and dreams.” Whether or not the British public will want to speak to him is another matter.

The new leader has his work cut out. His most immediate task will be to unite his parliamentary caucus, whose remaining eleven MPs are fractious. When I asked Bath MP Wera Hobhouse about Davey during the leadership contest, she deliberately raised questions about his principles. “I wonder whether, because he’s been working with the Tories for five years, he leans centre-right. I don’t want to question that, but in the eyes of the public, the association with the Tories will always land him in the centre-right,” she said.

That baggage will likely plague Davey until the next election. The Tories have become an anathema to Lib Dem voters since Brexit, making it more difficult for the former Energy Secretary to defend his years in the Coalition Cabinet. It will also be a go-to attack line for Labour activists, who know there are receptive MPs, such as Hobhouse, on the Lib Dem benches.

It is undeniable that Davey comes from the same culture and tradition that sunk the party to historic lows. He was a senior figure under Nick Clegg, Tim Farron, and Jo Swinson, and supported the disastrous decision to include revoking Article 50 without a second referendum in the 2019 Lib Dem manifesto. Yet he became leader today with a promise to carve out a new niche for his party.

Some activists are optimistic about the opportunity to refresh the party’s identity. “You’re going to see a return to traditional liberal values, the kind of party looking back to Charles Kennedy and Paddy,” Leena Sara Farhat, a Lib Dem candidate for the Welsh Parliament told me. If that is the case, we should expect heightened cooperation with Labour on parliamentary opposition, and close alignment between the two party’s policies.

There are two factors to suggest this could work for Davey. First, the Labour leadership does not consider him to pose a threat to their left plank – their most sensitive point – which they feared would be the case with Layla Moran. And second, Davey and Keir Starmer see the world in similar ways, with incrementalism at the core of their progressivism. The two men could forge a friendly alliance, and perhaps even an electoral alliance when the next election comes.

If the Lib Dems fail to attract media attention, however, such an approach comes to nothing. The party has thrived off being peculiarly interesting in the past, hosting fun events for bored journalists and coming up with crazy ideas that make for good copy. But in the age of Boris they are up against a Downing Street which deliberately consumes every inch of media space – with some residue left for Sir Keir Starmer on an off day.

How Davey gets his message out in such an environment is an existential question. Some have suggested he run a hyper-engagement strategy, which worked for Pete Buttigieg, a small-town mayor, in the U.S. Democratic primaries. It would require accepting every slot at any time, on podcasts, radio and television, to increase visibility. A desperate strategy, but one that would be justified by the dire position his party is in.

Earlier this month, a senior Lib Dem staffer told Reaction: “Sometimes we underestimate how bad it’s become. We have eleven MPs. We could have none by 2024. What then?” This is a reality Ed Davey acknowledged in this morning’s acceptance speech. “We must change, we have to wake up and smell the coffee,” he proclaimed.

Now, he has four years to bring his party back from the dead.