A decade ago, the Liberal Democrats fell victim to the “black widow strategy”. Having mated with Nick Clegg’s party for the purposes of coalition, the Conservatives then devoured them. Twenty-seven Lib Dem seats – West Country fortresses thought impregnable – were won by a majority-bound David Cameron.
This electoral shock cast doubt on the party’s very existence. In 2010, Clegg had aspired to break the Tory-Labour duopoly and become prime minister. By 2015, he had too few MPs to fill a committee room (eight). But the Lib Dems are now enjoying glorious revenge.
At the last election they won 60 seats from the Conservatives – not only reclaiming their West Country heartlands but advancing through the Tories’ own. South-east voters repelled by “partygate”, the Truss debacle and rampant sewage, relished Ed Davey’s offer of moderation. Areas once represented by the likes of Cameron (Witney), Michael Gove (Surrey Heath) and John Redwood (Wokingham) now have Lib Dem MPs.
Today, in Oxfordshire, Davey will make his mission clear – “to replace the Conservatives as the party of Middle England”. Local elections held in Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire and Shropshire offer fertile territory for the Lib Dems (who aim to become the second party of local government). Strategists speak of “Project 312” – the number of councillors held by the Tories in seats they lost or narrowly won at the general election.
For the Lib Dems, this represents a distinctive choice. The last time Labour was in government, they positioned themselves to the party’s left – opposing the Iraq War, campaigning against university tuition fees and backing higher taxes (such as a 50p rate on income). This time, aides emphasise, they have no intention of doing the same.
Davey’s regular condemnation of Donald Trump, for instance, is consciously framed as “patriotic” – think Hugh Grant in Love Actually rather than Jeremy Corbyn at a Stop the War rally. The Lib Dems oppose Labour’s imposition of VAT on private schools – a stance that aligns them with affluent “Blue Wall” voters – and its extension of inheritance tax to large farms. They favour a new customs union with the EU but nothing as radical as a second referendum (West Country voters are sturdily Eurosceptic).
In their quest to become the natural home of the centre right, the Lib Dems have an unlikely ally: the leader of the Conservative Party. During a recent hour-long interview with the aspirant philosopher Jordan Peterson, Kemi Badenoch derided a “typical Liberal Democrat” as someone who is “good at fixing their church roof and – you know – people in the community like them: ‘Oh, he fixed the church roof, you should be a Member of Parliament.’”
It was the kind of comment that makes you question whether Badenoch has any acquaintance with the Conservatives’ traditional base. The Blue Wall is a land, as John Major once put it, of “long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers” and, one could add, of village fundraisers to fix the church roof. But Badenoch, too often trapped in an online filter bubble, has little feel for the Burkeans who cherish all of this. Though the Conservatives lost 12 times as many seats to the Lib Dems (60) as to Reform (five), she obsesses over the latter and ignores or insults the former.
Such complacency could prove fatal. At the last election, the Blue Wall was battered rather than toppled – but it could be next time. Of the Lib Dems’ 30 notional target seats, all but four are held by the Tories (and would fall with a swing of 8.8 points). Though it is Nigel Farage’s Reform that is routinely cast as an existential threat to the Tories, this may be even more true of the Lib Dems. For if the Conservatives permanently concede southern England to Davey, they will not only have lost their heartland – they will have lost their soul.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Anas Sarwar: “Energy security is national security”]
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