The Lib Dems are on the verge of a serious surge. Will they blow it?

For those of us who try to avoid the Liberal Democrats, preferring British politics as a two-party Tory v Labour punch up with a side order of bashing the Scottish Nationalists, these are difficult times.

Thanks to the Brexit crisis the Lib Dems are back and on the verge of a surge. They are polling in the high teens and low twenties by appealing to Remainers angry at the epic chicanery and low-grade muppetry of the two main parties who are struggling to poll in the mid-twenties. Even if Labour becomes a proper party of Remain its Brexity leader Jeremy Corbyn is not trusted and a portion of its MPs are pro-Brexit. Surely this is an opportunity for the Lib Dems – Britain’s diminished centrist party sitting on just 12 seats in a 650 seat House of Commons – to hoover up support. For that reason, they have to be taken seriously again.

With perfect timing, they will announce their new leader on Monday just as the Tories unveil a new Prime Minister. For the Lib Dems it will be either Jo Swinson, MP for East Dunbartonshire, or Sir Ed Davey, MP for Kingston and Surbiton and a former minister.

I must confess that I managed almost two decades in political journalism before I felt compelled to attend a Liberal Democrat national conference in 2010, when the party made it into government as part of the coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives. In the 1990s I did once attend a Scottish Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow. It was just about okay, but that is mainly because I like Jim Wallace, now Lord Wallace, the former deputy first minister of Scotland.

Today, the crisis in decaying British politics is now so advanced that it looks as though I may have to attend Lib Dem conference this year (checks online that it is in seaside Bournemouth, and it is, which is nice) in order to hear what they are up to and what they plan if they get near power. This is how grave  the situation is – I’m writing about the Lib Dems for the first time in years.

Why? An early general election this autumn that could bring them attention and serious influence looks likely. It has hard to see how the new Tory Prime Minister, who takes office next week without a functioning majority in the House of Commons, avoids falling into holding an early election. If it happens this autumn, the Libs Dems could easily end up as power-brokers in a hung parliament if they hold the balance of power. In the most extreme of circumstances, in a volatile climate, a Liberal Democrat could even emerge as compromise Prime Minister at the head of a “rainbow” coalition involving a diminished Labour party and the SNP.

Think that sounds daft? The British system is a first past the post set-up used to two and a bit parties in England, with added complexity in Scotland. British polling and psephology is not set up to cope with the possibility of both – not one, both – of the two largest parties failing in a general election to poll above 30%. If the Tories fail to put the Brexit party out of business at an emergency general election, and Labour continues its death spiral, no-one knows what the geographical spread or number of seats would look like. The Lib Dems could win all manner of seats in unlikely parts of the country where on the face of it they need giant swings.

At the more attainable end of their target list, in a seat such as ultra-Remain Cambridge – won by the Lib Dems as recently as 2010 – they need a 11% swing to take it from Labour. It is 20th on the Lib Dem target list. With the mess Labour has made of appealing to its Remain voters in the South, you have to mark it down as a decent prospect for the Lib Dems.

The seat of South Cambridgeshire is 37th on the Lib Dem target list. Remainer Heidi Allen MP won it is a Tory (stop laughing, Tories) in 2017 with more than 50% of the vote. This year she quit the Tories in protest over Brexit in particular and Toryism in general, establishing Change Whatever They Were Called. Allen is now sitting as an independent.

This is an MP who wanted to recommend Remainers backing the Lib Dems in the recent European Elections. Won’t Allen end up as the Lib Dem anti-Brexit candidate at an election? She will if the Lib Dems are switched on. It’s a Remain seat and she is well-established locally and on national media. The House of Commons Library model of constituency voting in the 2016 referendum suggests South Cambridgeshire voted 61.5% Remain.

In normal circumstances, the Tories would have no problem whatsoever holding a seat such as Newbury. The highly capable Richard Benyon won it from the Lib Dems in 2005 and has built the majority to 26,368. In 2017 he won a stonking 61.5% of the vote. It is 54th on the Lib Dem target list.

But what if Boris messes it up and the Brexit party, refusing to back down, runs in a seat like Newbury? The seat went 52-48 for Remain  in 2016. Benyon was for Remain; he’s a pragmatic Tory. If the Brexit party targets angry Brexiteers and runs against him, perhaps taking 10,000 votes out of the Tory total, and this is combined with switching by Tory Remainers, say of 7,000 votes piled on the Lib Dem total, then an ultra-safe Tory seat is suddenly a knife-edge marginal.

Worse for the Tories, there is the first talk of a Remain “coupon” or loose agreement – that is an arrangement by which anti-Brexit parties stand aside for the Remain party more likely to win. A cabinet minister explained to me that he thinks this is where things are headed. “This is what really worries me. I’m already seeing local Labour and Lib Dem cooperation on my patch,” he said.

It should be obvious by now, unless you are observing British politics wearing blinkers, that there exists scope for extraordinary volatility and myriad strange outcomes in an early election.

That’s why on Friday evening I did something unprecedented. I watched the Lib Dem leadership debate on BBC Two between Swinson and Davey. The party’s veteran leader Vince Cable, a former cabinet minister from the coalition era, is standing down.

I’m new to Lib Dem leadership debates. Are they always that sanctimonious? Or were Swinson and Davey pushing particularly hard for the sanctimonious vote?

It was not so much the brazen declaration that they want to overturn the 2016 referendum and stop Brexit. Like most Leavers I’m used to that, although it still strikes me as quite troubling that otherwise intelligent  people think that doing this – refusing to implement a referendum result – can possibly turn out well or be a healing experience. Think Britain is divided now? Try a second referendum, or tell you what, let’s make it best of three or best of five.

Davey’s problem hasn’t changed since his spell as a minister in the coalition. Unfairly or not, he comes across as an uneasy, brittle media performer.

Swinson is a toughie who won back her seat in 2017 by facing down and out-organising the SNP. But there’s something amiss. Although the younger Swinson is ostensibly the more appealing candidate, she can’t shake that terrible, pious, illiberal ultra-liberal tendency to look astonished, truly shocked and appalled, when encountering opinions other than her own. Her own world view sounds always like standard issue, woke-lite, virtue signalling with the added assumption that all decent people must automatically agree with Jo Swinson. It is a style of presentation one can envisage becoming unpopular quite quickly.

Watching the pair of them, I kept thinking about Charlie Kennedy. Not Charlie Kennedy in his final tragic years before his early passing, but Kennedy in his youth brimming with ecumenical generosity, decency and vitality, before he became Lib Dem leader. If a character of that kind became Lib Dem leader right now then such a figure, someone with a plain style of talking and a sense of humour, could be popular and have electoral appeal. Tory Rory Stewart could do it, but he’s in the Tory party.

Neither Swinson nor Davey looked during the debate like a leader ready for the national stage, but politics in Britain is playing such strange tricks right now that the winner might might grow and flower in the bright glare of an election campaign. If they do, they have a great opportunity. Remainers and centrists want a party to vote for. There is centrist donor money aplenty out there. The Lib Dems now have the support and assistance, it was revealed this week, of the US pollster and Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg. The party is rebuilding its local government base and national electoral success is there for the taking.

The Tories had better hope the Lib Dems blow it.