Who will lead the fight to save the Lib Dems from electoral oblivion?

It’s fair to say that the Liberal Democrats’ leadership election has failed to capture the imagination of the public. In truth it has scarcely made a mark in Westminster. The two candidates, Sir Ed Davey and Layla Moran, are fighting to lead a party on its knees, now with just eleven MPs, down from 57 when it entered government ten years ago. The result is due to be announced on August 27; the victor will have the unenviable task of stopping their party from going extinct at the next election.

For some Liberal Democrats, however, this leadership election is a decisive moment, an opportunity finally to distance the party’s brand from the Coalition years. These progressive activists and MPs pin most of the party’s woes in recent years to Nick Clegg’s decision to work with David Cameron.

“Across the country we were leading many big local governments,” said Wera Hobhouse, an early candidate for the leadership who dropped out to support Layla Moran. “That was all sacrificed on the altar of being in national government.”

She added: “After the coalition we struggled to move forward. Other than the Brexit bubble we haven’t really moved forward. Jo [Swinson] could not move away from the Coalition legacy. The fact is that she was a minister in the Coalition government and part of the Coalition.”

Yet the front-runner in the race, Ed Davey, is very much a continuation of that legacy, having served as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change for three years in the Coalition government. Although Davey has distanced himself from the more conservative policies pursued by the Coalition, he remains fundamentally compromised in the eyes of the more progressive wing of the party, including some of his parliamentary colleagues.

“I wonder whether because he’s been working with the Tories for five years, whether 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,” said Hobhouse.

Leena Sarah Farhat, a Lib Dem candidate for the Welsh Parliament, added: “There were some good things that came out of the coalition but there were very nasty things too. That will be on Ed’s voting record. It won’t be on Layla’s.”

Davey’s front-runner status attests to the fact that there remains a considerable contingent of the party which remains broadly supportive of the party’s role in the Cameron government, albeit fairly quietly

“He owns the Coalition quite well,” said Christopher Oram, an author and Lib Dem activist. “If you look at the 80 seats where the Lib Dems are second across the country, they are second in mostly Tory seats. Ed would be well placed to win back those soft Tories.”

A staffer at Liberal Democrat HQ echoed that sentiment, adding: “Some of our members don’t like hearing it, but we have traditionally relied on Conservative voters as well as Labour voters. If you completely reject conservatism as a legitimate and sometimes well-placed ideology, you lose every seat but two or three.”

Layla Moran, the second candidate, is perhaps the least suited Liberal Democrat MP to appeal to those Conservative voters. She has presented herself as an unorthodox, quirkily progressive politician. At times, however, this has played into a media narrative that she’s just a bit weird. At the 2013 Lib Dem party conference, Moran and her then-partner Richard Davis were arrested by Police Scotland after she slapped him.

“I was initially charged in line with the zero-tolerance policy but then the charges were dropped and there was no case to answer,” she said last year. Moran has since come out as a pansexual, following a recent relationship with a female former party aide.

The contrast with Davey goes much further than personality. Moran would be the first Liberal Democrat leader since the Coalition who was not an MP when the party entered government. She has emphasised this fact in interviews, telling Matt Forde: “At uni, I voted Lib Dem because it was the cool thing to do. That’s just not the case anymore…let’s draw a line under it. Show that we’ve learned the lessons. Talk about the future, and then campaign on how we’re going to change the country.”

Moran’s parliamentary supporters have also been keen to pointedly frame her as the change candidate. “Last year’s contest wasn’t so much a choice. This year there is a clear choice between continuation and debate,” said Hobhouse.

The second point of contention in the race has come from what was widely perceived to be a gaffe by Moran, who made comments about the need for the Liberal Democrats to be “even more radical than Labour”. The implication was that the party should be more visibly left-wing – a stark contrast to Davey’s centrism.

This triggered quite an avalanche of coded criticisms from senior Lib Dems, causing Moran to row back quickly on her comments. Former leaders Tim Farron and Vince Cable were openly contemptuous of the idea, with the former writing that “a battle to be ‘leftier than thou’ would be a self-indulgent path to oblivion”.

Most of the party activists who spoke to Reaction agreed with their former leaders. “I’m not comfortable with the word radical. It’s not a word people are comfortable with countrywide. If you want to appeal to soft Tory voters, that’s not the way to do it,” said Oram.

A senior party staffer was less diplomatic: “That was a big boo-boo. It was so idiotic, and it did prove everyone’s worst fears about her. Layla doesn’t understand how politics works. It’s almost as if, to her, it’s still about getting new social media followers and being friends with journalists. It’s about being a popular schoolgirl in Westminster.”

The objective was to emphasise the fact that she was a change candidate, but Moran clearly, badly misjudged the mood of her party in this instance. Sources close to Davey have noted that challenging Labour from the left would make the chances of an informal pact at the next election less likely. “Even a small increase in Labour activism in the eight constituencies we have left could cause a complete wipe out. The end of the party,” said a former Davey aide.

Despite their clear differences in character, the two candidates were in lockstep on what was arguably the most important decision for the party since it left government in 2015: the pledge to revoke Article 50 at the last general election. The Lib Dem 2019 Election Review said this was a moment in which the party “appeared to run contrary to what many knew to be a core Liberal Democratic principle of fairness.”

Davey was partially responsible for the decision, as deputy leader of the party at the time and a key proponent of a hardcore Remain position. Moran, on the other hand, was merely a spokesperson, but her enthusiastic support for the move has implicated her in the decision.

“See, there’s no space to attack Davey on that,” said an adviser to Moran’s campaign, “because Layla was all over the television supporting it. That has handicapped the campaign a little, it has certainly disarmed us of what would have been a very impressive weapon.”

Both candidates, spurred by the uncompromising result of the Election Review, are now agreed that the revoke policy was a mistake. “When we introduced revoke, I defended it because it’s logically pure… but the way that it made people feel was that it was antidemocratic,” Moran told Iain Dale last week.

There is in fact a good deal of agreement between the candidates over the party’s broad approach. There has long been a debate amongst Liberal Democrats over whether to adopt a “core vote” strategy, which calls for building the kind of strong, tribal base of support which both Labour and the Conservatives have long enjoyed, or whether to return to focusing on a bottom-up approach, whereby individual MPs prove their worth to constituents by working hard on local issues.

Both Moran and Davey are agreed that the latter of those two notions, a more traditionalist Liberal Democrat approach to political organisation based on community organisation and constituency politics should be adopted. Again, lessons appear to have been learnt from the Election Review, which concluded that Jo Swinson’s efforts to build a core vote in 2019 meant that “at some point our broad range of social and economic values was reduced to being simply a ‘Remainer’.”

This strategic consensus has led some activists to hope for a return to a pre-Clegg party; the good old days. “You’re going to see a return to traditional liberal values, the kind of party looking back to Charles Kennedy and Paddy,” said Leena Sara Farhat, a Lib Dem candidate for the Welsh Parliament. “We haven’t had that since the coalition, and we didn’t see it with Jo because she was so focused on one issue.”

There is also a lot of consensus over policy priorities. Both candidates have called for radical environmental policies; both have proposed a Universal Basic Income, although there are divergences in how they intend to pay for it; both want to focus on improving the benefits system for carers.

The reality behind this policy consensus is that Liberal Democrat leaders don’t have the kind of power over policies we traditionally expect from a party leader. Rather, the party’s members decide the policy platform at the conference.

“In any case, we have eight MPs. No one’s going to care about our policies. It will be the big image,” said a party aide. “Who is this person? Do they look sensible?” Our relevance has always been linked to the leader’s ability to grab the national agenda.”

Indeed, Charles Kennedy’s popularity soared when he was the only one of the three main party leaders in 2003 to oppose the Iraq War. Paddy Ashdown gave brilliant interviews and had an extraordinary personal story to tell, and so was given disproportionate attention by journalists who, frankly, enjoyed his company. Nick Clegg was young and vibrant, and performed brilliantly in the 2010 election debates.

If either of the two current candidates are going to transform the party’s fortunes, they must first learn to finesse the news agenda – something both have struggled with thus far.

“Neither of them are good with the media,” said an adviser to Moran’s campaign. “Ed has been acting leader for months now. I can’t remember the last interview he gave. He does plenty, but they are unremarkable. He comes on the screen and people tune out completely. Layla has had a difficult time also. The pansexual issue, going out with a former staffer, and the domestic abuse allegations have made a lot of journalists think she’s a fruitcake. She’s treated like a person they should only report on sarcastically.”

As the leader of a much-diminished party, with just eleven MPs to hand, it is difficult to see how the victor in this contest can change the party’s current trajectory. Sources from both camps were unified in their pessimism about the long-term prospects for their party.

“Sometimes we underestimate how bad it’s become,” said a party aide. “We have eleven MPs. We could have none by 2024. What then?”