Sir Ed Davey doesn’t mind acting the silly stunt. If it’s Tuesday, he’s on Windermere to demonstrate his absence of flair for paddleboarding by falling in multiple times. If it’s Wednesday, he’s mounting a bike to do a wobbly wheelie as he hurtles down a steep hill in Wales. If it’s Thursday, he’s careening down a waterslide in Somerset. “Have you got a wetsuit?” is the informal motto of Yellow Hammer 1, his campaign battlebus. I climbed aboard on Friday in the hope of seeing more comedic action from the stuntman. Visiting a target seat in the home counties, the Lib Dem leader plonks on a chef’s hat and joins a baking lesson for primary schoolchildren during which he confesses he is no Mary Berry. I protest to his team that, while quite charming, this gimmick is a bit tame. One of his aides suggests that he needs protecting from himself: “We’ve got to be careful not to get him injured.”
There is method in his malarkey. Much of the battle for the Lib Dems is persuading the national media to pay them any attention. If he has to play the good-for-a-laugh centrist dad to get himself on TV and in the newspapers, he reckons the pratfalls are a sacrifice worth making. You aren’t going to see Sir Keir Starmer on a paddleboard. Since no one thinks Sir Ed is going to be prime minister, he doesn’t have to do the gravitas thing. He also looks like a man who is enjoying himself, which is more than can be said for the stolid electioneering of his rivals.
The Lib Dems are due a bit of fun. Their track record at recent general elections has been mirthless, at least for them. They were crushed down to just eight seats in 2015 after the Con-Lib coalition, secured a paltry 12 in 2017 and a meagre 11 in 2019. Five years on, the Lib Dems are feeling chipper, hoping to take back areas they’ve held before in historic stomping grounds in the West Country and parts of Scotland as well as bashing into new territory in the “blue wall” by scalping Tories in southern England.
Sir Ed says there isn’t “a ceiling on our ambitions”, but there evidently is and it is self-imposed. The lesson he and other senior members of his party took away from their dismal showing at the last election was that they over-reached. Jo Swinson, the then leader, chased loads of seats, only to end up losing her own. This time they have what one Lib Dem strategist calls a “small but perfectly formed” list of targets chosen with a wary eye on the party’s constrained resources and a clinical one on what it is realistic to aim for. In some previous elections, the Lib Dems have marketed themselves as the “plague on both your houses” party, equidistant between Labour and the Conservatives. Sir Ed characterises this as an “ABC election” (Anyone but the Conservatives) and is pitching his party as the “Tory removal service” in places where the Lib Dems are the principal challenger.
It is his party, more than Labour, that poses the greatest personal threat to several high-profile Tories. Cabinet names in the Lib Dems’ sights include education secretary Gillian Keegan in Chichester, culture secretary Lucy Frazer in east Cambridgeshire and Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, who has a hugely vulnerable majority of less than a thousand in Cheltenham. The highest value target on the Lib Dem hitlist is Jeremy Hunt who can feel their hot breath on his neck in Godalming and Ash in Surrey. The chancellor has injected more than £100,000 of his own money into his local Tory party. At a recent charity event, he jokingly urged opponents of the government to back Labour in his seat to split the anti-Tory vote and help him fend off “those bastards, the Lib Dems”.
Team Davey believes that targeting senior Tories is good for attracting coverage, rustling up donations and attracting voters with the thought of punishing the Conservatives for the last 14 years by ejecting a cabinet name. It also presents a headache for Tory campaign planners by pinning down high-profile Conservatives in local struggles to save their skins.
Sir Ed is fishing among two pots of voters. One group are the potential switchers, people who voted Tory in 2019 and have since become estranged from them. Canvassing and polling suggests to the Lib Dems that quite a lot of these voters are currently calling themselves undecided. It is conjectured that many of them may not start breaking decisively one way or another until the final weekend of campaigning. The Lib Dems have clocked up some spectacular byelection gains by capitalising on discontent among these voters. They need to do the same on 4 July.
The other challenge for the Lib Dems is to impress the virtues of tactical voting on left-leaning voters in the targeted seats. One of the leadership team says: “It’s critical, really critical, that Labour supporters in these seats know they have to vote Lib Dem if they want to get change.” Helpfully, the poison between the two opposition parties at the time of the Mid Bedfordshire byelection appears to have largely drained away. It was notable that Labour did not join the hypocritical Tory attacks on Sir Ed for his role in the Post Office scandal. He and Sir Keir have not had a bad word to say about each other on the campaign trial. Sir Ed is keen to stress that the two parties share many common values, arguing that’s another reason for Labour supporters to lend their votes to the Lib Dems where it is the most efficient way to unseat a Tory.
Friday’s campaign tour took in places that illustrate the kind of constituencies he is hoping to bag in southern England. The first call was Hitchin and Harpenden in Hertfordshire, where the Treasury minister Bim Afolami had 27,719 votes at the last election, with the Lib Dems about 7,000 behind and Labour scoring just shy of 10,000. Then to the neighbouring market town of Berkhamsted, a new seat created by the boundary changes, where the Lib Dems stole a march by selecting their candidate some time before the Conservatives got someone in place. The last stop was Wimbledon in south London, where the former Tory minister Stephen Hammond had 20,373 votes in 2019, the Lib Dems were fewer than 1,000 behind and Labour stood on 12,543.
The manner in which Labour and the Tories have begun their campaigns is encouraging for Sir Ed. Rishi Sunak’s desperate scattergun of promises – a quarter-baked proposal to bring back national service, an unfunded tax lollipop for pensioners and an attack on “Mickey Mouse” degrees – are designed to appeal to rightwing voters of advancing years. The Tory pitch is much less likely to appeal to liberal, centrist folk in relatively affluent seats. Voters there are most animated by issues that the Lib Dems are using as their campaign themes, strongest among them being the dilapidated state of public services and the befoulment of our waterways.
As for Sir Keir, it has been safety first and don’t say anything that might frighten the swing voter from Labour. This suits the Lib Dems just fine. Among the kind of people they are after, 2019 was a disaster for the Lib Dems in part because Jeremy Corbyn scared those voters into the arms of the Conservatives. Sir Ed thinks it a big help to him that Labour’s prospective prime minister isn’t alarming to potential switchers.
What would a good result for the Lib Dems look like? Their primary ambition is to gain sufficient seats to supplant the SNP as the third largest grouping in the Commons, the position they held until 2015. Third-party status would secure the Lib Dems a higher public profile in the next parliament as well as more members and chairs on select committees. It would also restore to the leader of the Lib Dems the automatic right to put two questions to the prime minister at every PMQs. While their campaigning implies that they want to see a Labour prime minister, they’d be best pleased if Sir Keir does not win by a massive margin. A Labour government with a modest majority would offer Sir Ed’s party opportunities to influence events and shape legislation.
To larger parties, this might not seem terribly ambitious. To the Lib Dems, being restored to the status of third party at Westminster would be ecstasy after so many years of agony. Sir Ed regards any number of silly stunts as a price well worth paying in pursuit of what would be a serious advance.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
• This article was amended on 2 June 2024. An earlier version misspelled the first name of Bim Afolami as “Ben”.
