Waitrose Women strategy is not going to work for the Lib Dems

Last night’s by-election results were not only crushing for the Conservatives, they were dismal for the Lib Dems too, beaten into fourth place in both Kingswood and Wellingborough by Reform.

If the party wants to pick up the pace before the country goes to the polls, it needs to come up with a few clever ploys to win over swinging voters.

Sadly, its latest electoral wheeze is unlikely to do the trick. Party strategists think they have identified two target groups that will help them triumph in Blue Wall seats.

“Waitrose Women”, who have tended to vote Tory, and “M&S Movers”, who are more likely to be Labour, are in Lib Dem sights in the Home Counties, southern shires and commuter belts.

According to party campaigners, Waitrose Women are 40 to 60-year-olds “fed up of [sic] Conservative politicians trashing the traditional institutions of the country” such as the Church of England, BBC and National Trust, and believe in “doing things the proper British way”.

M&S Movers, meanwhile, are a younger demographic who have relocated out of London to raise families and care deeply about climate change and Gary Lineker and his causes.

I hope I’m never seated next to one of the Movers at a dinner party, but I can’t avoid a Waitrose Woman because I think she is supposed to be me and my milieu.

The Lib Dems apparently based their premise on data canvassed from local and by-elections, where typical Tories switched to the Lib Dems. But their Waitrose stereotype is lazy profiling that sounds like it was dreamt up by AI. And it’s not even original.

The Tories singled out Waitrose Women in 2022, when Boris Johnson tried to win back disillusioned affluent southerners wooed by the Lib Dems.

Sebastian Payne, now a would-be Conservative candidate, wrote in the Financial Times in June that year: “The party should mollify its natural voters on cultural matters. The Tory base adore national institutions — BBC Radio 4, the National Trust and parliament among them…Waitrose Woman is not opposed to reform, but the Conservatives need to emphasise conserving.’

Johnson went on to win a landslide of course, but it’s not fair to blame Waitrose Women. We are as far removed from the cliché as Ed Davey is from occupying Number 10 at some point this year.

The spoilt upper middle classes who inspired the “Overheard at Waitrose” spoof Twitter account (“Darling, do we need parmesan for both houses?”) are not a breed I recognise from my own branch, which is in the extremities of London rather than the Home Counties and a Lib Dem stronghold to boot.

We might not be a main target as we’re already in the bag (for life, in some cases), but because our allegiance is a given, we could serve as a useful template. 

On the newspaper racks, there are as many Mails and Telegraphs as Guardians languishing at the end of the day, and in the aisles, the social mix is the same as on the streets outside. 

The friends and neighbours I bump into, if they have a common denominator at all, conform roughly to a consensus that hates Boris, would veer towards Labour not Tory without the local Lib Dem hegemony, only liked the Church of England when they were trying to get their children into Anglican primaries, and tune into the BBC for Strictly and Traitors, but rarely Radio 4.

In Surrey, bang in the middle of the Lib Dems’ wish list, my sister-in-law tells a similar tale. Waitrose Women are “hugely diverse these days”, she says, though, as she notes, the limited number of outlets (compared to, say, Tesco, or Sainsbury’s) tend to be in relatively affluent areas.

Women, and men in fact, shop where it is most convenient and their values and politics are more likely to be synonymous with location than supermarket preference.

The Lib Dem appeal to a certain type of shopper’s sense of Britishness, or peculiar attachment to the National Trust, suggests a strategy team as out of touch as John Major back in the 1990s, with his “long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers” vision of the nation.

Waitrose Women are supposedly dog lovers too, by the way, and their passions include Countryfile and a celebrity chef called James Martin, described by one writer as “Middle England’s guilty crush”, so therefore irresistible, obviously, to WW in Lib Dem imaginations.

Some target groups have proved successful in the past when they have focused on geographical targets, such as marginal seats.

Tony Blair’s infamous Mondeo Man was an acquisitive middle-income homeowner in swing seats that his party needed to win over from the Tories.

Worcester Woman sprung from the Worcester constituency, historically a crucial marginal, and targeted by Tories who credited her with helping Major to victory in 1992.

The Lib Dems, whose main electoral targets, outside Scotland, are Conservative constituencies where Labour is less of a threat, need to get to know their audience better.

If they think they can topple the Tories by pigeonholing floating voters according to the supermarket they visit, they are off their trolley.

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