Ed Davey’s speech at the Lib Dem conference began with a darkened stage on which you could just about make out outlines of people and quotes by and about him booming over the sound system. Like most things the Lib Dems do, it felt a bit like a self-consciously modern re-interpretation of Shakespeare by a group of earnest undergraduates. Two Gentlemen of Verona set in a Detroit smack den, Othello but everyone has feline HIV, that sort of thing.
Davey is a very immodest man with a great deal to be immodest about
Onto this stage Davey emerged. And there was light. It turned out that the amorphous shapes were actually the Lib Dem MPs who sat there in the dark. Suddenly we were subjected to them in full technicolour: it looked like a very po-faced game of ‘Guess Who?’.
Davey began with a list of Lib Dem successes. He is, regrettably, a very immodest man with a great deal to be immodest about. The Lib Dems are a sizeable chunk of the House of Commons and of councils and, if polls are to be believed, Davey could be the next Leader of the Opposition. There was much triumphalism. I would invoke the Emperor’s New Clothes but the thought of Davey – who has a bizarre swagger when on stage which involves him leading from the crotch – without a stitch on is a step too far.
There were specific targets; ‘I say to Conservative friends, come and help us save our country’. It was a bit like having the Terminator’s ‘come with me if you want to live’ delivered by Mr Bean. He wanted to overtake the Tories and decimate Labour. All of these were spiced with references to Davey’s intensely irritating stunts; ‘get the bungee harness ready because my ambition has no ceiling.’ Davey is sort of the perfect Lib Dem leader, all stunt and no responsibility. He’ll skip the queue at Alton Towers but he won’t meet the Post Masters, whom his incompetence when a minister helped put in prison.
He then invoked Hugh Grant in Love Actually with a shudder-inducing list of what made him proud to be British; ‘The land of the Lionesses and the home of Formula One… Male Voice Choirs and Hogmanay’. This was a catalogue of twee; ‘Paddington patriotism’ in its purest, cringiest form.
Much of the talk, however, was bizarrely America-brained. It was difficult to work out at times which country it is that Davey wants to run. There was more mention of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, even Andrew Tate, than of Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer. Should Mr Farage make it into Number 10, warned the Postmaster’s Friend, his first act would be to privatise the NHS.
The American obsession reached its nadir when Mr Davey implied that a Reform government might lead to US-style school shootings in Britain. What other deranged conjecture will Nostradamus Davey think up next; they’re going to put the Grand Canyon on the Lincolnshire Wolds, turn the Henley Royal Regatta into a powerboat race? There’s a secret plan to replace Fish and Chips with compulsory corn dogs? Nigel Farage’s real name is ‘Cody Bumgardener IV’?
The target audience for this stuff seems to be the terminally online parts of middle England; people who tut at how ghastly Donald Trump is while the man from Waitrose unloads the shopping into their second fridge. People whose comfort and wealth inures them from the actual problems facing this country and so they can afford to think that politics is about making faces like someone’s farted if they see a Tesla.
The Americanism continued in his finale when he referenced Frank Sinatra. ‘Yes friends, I will keep doing it’ – dramatic pause – ‘my way’. Davey has the constant air of a boy who was once told that they were funny out of pity by an elderly relative and now insists on telling dreadful jokes at every opportunity. Whether his core demographic of the well off but angry will carry on finding him funny for four years is another question.
Comments