The ‘silver linings’ of the Lib Dems’ election disaster

Today the Liberal Democrats have published an independent review into their disastrous showing at the 2019 election, which saw its former leader Jo Swinson lose her seat, and the party drop to only 11 MPs in the Commons – despite starting the campaign at 20 per cent in the polls.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the election review doesn’t exactly pull its punches when it comes to the party’s 2019 performance, describing the election as ‘a high speed car crash’ where the party’s policies failed to cut-through, ‘didn’t add up to anything cohesive’ and ‘alienated large chunks of the population’ with its Stop Brexit stance. The report is equally brutal about Jo Swinson’s leadership of the party. It says that the campaign was micro-managed by the leader’s office which not only slowed everything down, but also ‘concentrated decision making in a small group whose belief in the leader and the mission was so strong that challenge was at best ignored and at worst actively discouraged.’