The Liberal Democrats launched their local election campaign yesterday in what has become their fashion: not with a serious speech delivering a flurry of policies designed to change the country, but with Ed Davey riding around on a wooden horse, while jumping about on a toy horseracing track. Just another one of Davey’s stunts, designed to get him and his party some attention without actually having to say anything of substance.
Lib Dem leader @EdwardJDavey launches his party's local election campaign by attempting hobby horsing pic.twitter.com/ARDZ0AUqri
— ITVPolitics (@ITVNewsPolitics) March 31, 2025
I understood during the general election campaign why the Lib Dems wanted to focus on these sorts of goofy moments. It felt new at the time, and it got the party the attention it needed without having to get into sticky policy issues that would have divided their potential electorate. This was particularly tough for the Lib Dems last summer given most of the voters they were aiming for were disaffected Tories, ‘Remainer Conservatives’, who had turned against that party over Brexit and Boris – and most of the Lib Dem activist base makes Richard Burgon look like a right-wing reactionary.
But these days, the stunts are old hat and becoming increasingly difficult to watch. Particularly given the seriousness of everything that is happening in the world right now. In Britain, we could really use a party that is vocal about standing up for liberal values. With Trump in the White House, and with Labour having to play nice with him given they are in government, a party that sticks up for free trade and free markets is desperately required. Instead, we have Davey and his increasingly annoying antics.
Having said all that, I get it. The Lib Dems are doing this mostly because they can get away with it, particularly while this strategy is still the easiest way to avoid the disconnect between their voters and their activists. Being about something would immediately cause problems for them. People like me who want a strong liberal party will complain, but what does that matter if people still vote for them en masse anyhow?
The main reason the Liberal Democrats can take the mickey in the way that they do is because of what is effectively the absence of a Conservative party across Great Britain. It’s as if every political party in the country met and decided unanimously to close the Tories down – including the Tories themselves. Nigel Farage can poach voters across the old Tory coalition because under Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives offer them essentially nothing. The Lib Dems can pick up the rest – Ed Davey is grabbing huge swathes of ex-Tory voters and he doesn’t even need to offer them anything. He just needs to ride around on a toy horse and that’s enough.
A lot of people want a centre-right liberal party to vote for on 1 May. The Lib Dems are not this and strangely enough, explicitly do not want to be this. They just want to be the Lib Dems, a difficult to define in words but you know it when you see it sort of a thing. A kind of nerdy leftism that is constantly annoyed with the way things are, but with a strange determination not to do very much about it.
Yet because the Lib Dems are the closest thing we have to a centre-right liberal party – and with the stunts, they are at least not antagonising these voters with leftist policies – then people who want that will vote for them anyhow. There is a huge Tory-sized hole in British politics that the Conservative party just stubbornly refuses to fill, so for now, Ed Davey gets some votes with childish japes, while Nigel Farage picks up the rest.
A huge slice of the electorate want a sensible, assured Conservative party to fix things. In the absence of that, most of them in a few weeks’ time will either go with Ed Davey and his silly stunts, or with Nigel Farage and his offer of something different. This will continue until the Tories decide they are serious about politics again. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any sign of that happening any time soon. Buckle up for a few more years of Ed Davey doing inane things dominating the airwaves in the meantime.
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