The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey, has come up with a novel way of ensuring his party gets greater coverage during the long weeks of the election campaign. His wheeze is to ensure that, each and every day, he is pictured doing something silly.
It doesn’t help that the party’s leader appears to think that the election campaign is best treated as one big joke
On Tuesday, he was pictured repeatedly falling from a paddleboard on Windermere in Cumbria – a stunt to highlight the issue of sewage dumping, apparently. On Wednesday, he was on a bike, peddling down a steep hill, ostensibly en route to the party’s Welsh campaign launch. ‘Having a wheelie great time,’ he tweeted.
Yesterday, he was in Frome, Somerset, where he was duly photographed riding down a children’s water slide in a large rubber ring. Afterwards, he described the experience as ‘really good fun.’ What voters make of it is anyone’s guess. Why would anyone else take him seriously if he is so obviously incapable of doing so himself? Pretty much everyone knows the Lib Dems have little chance of forming the next government, but it doesn’t help that the party’s own leader appears to think that the election campaign is best treated as one big joke.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is visiting Somerset today as part of his election campaign.
— ITV News West Country (@itvwestcountry) May 30, 2024
The rain didn't seem to get in the way as he tried out the 'Ultimate Slip N Slide' in Shepton Mallet.
He's just been told he is not allowed any more goes. pic.twitter.com/lWWbeLAZqu
Davey, no surprise, doesn’t see his antics in this way: ‘I think my belief is that politicians need to take the concerns and interests of voters seriously but I’m not sure they need to take themselves seriously all the time, and I’m quite happy to have some fun.’
It is not immediately obvious how going down a water slide dressed in swimming trunks and a T-shirt helps to highlight the actual policy announcement the Lib Dems are supposedly pushing. That is a plan to triple the Digital Services Tax (which was introduced in 2020 and levies a 2 per cent charge on the revenues of search engines, social media services and online marketplace companies’ revenues). The party says it will use the money raised to fund mental health professionals for all England’s state schools.
When he wasn’t distracted by all the fun and frolics of campaigning, Davey also made plain that, like Labour and the Conservatives have also promised, the Lib Dems have ruled out raising income tax, national insurance or VAT to pay for their plans. So, just an ordinary run of the mill politician, promising the earth without quite explaining how it might be paid for – but one who likes to do silly stunts for the cameras.
I suspect the jolly japes may not last too long for the Liberal Democrat leader. He is due to appear before the Post Office Inquiry on 18 July, a mere two weeks after the election. He faces a number of troubling questions about his time as the postal affairs minister from 2010 to 2012. He has been accused of having ‘fobbed off’ victims of the scandal, which has been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history. More than 700 branch managers were given criminal convictions after faulty software made it appear as though money was missing. Some went to prison. Many were financially ruined. Some have since died.
Davey has insisted in his defence that he was ‘misled’ by Post Office executives. What Alan Bates (someone Davey initially refused to meet, saying he did not believe it ‘would serve any purpose’) and other campaigners for justice make of his election japes for the cameras is a moot point. The party’s former ministers, Jo Swinson and Vince Cable, are also due to appear before the inquiry in July – which only serves to reinforce the point that the Liberal Democrats in the coalition government of the time were anything but a joke. One thing can be said for certain: Davey will get all the attention he craves when he appears before the inquiry. One suspects that his claims about not taking himself too seriously might not go down too well there.
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