Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What’s going wrong for the Lib Dems?

The Liberal Democrats may have brought confetti canons to their manifesto launch, but they have still struggled to get as much attention today as they hoped, given Boris Johnson’s loose lips on the National Insurance threshold cut. They are also – by leader Jo Swinson’s own admission – suffering a squeeze in the polls.

The latest YouGov poll has the party on 15 per cent, trailing Labour which is on 30 per cent and the Tories on 42 per cent. Perhaps more worryingly, given the focus on Swinson herself, voters don’t seem to warm to her the more they find out about her. What’s going wrong?

One of the main problems might be that the party has miscalculated what its strongest selling points are. The campaign is heavily focused on two things: Swinson and the stop Brexit pledge. It is hard to move for massive pictures of the Lib Dem leader, whether on the battle bus or in party documents and today’s manifesto was branded ‘Jo Swinson’s plan for Britain’s future’. Party political broadcasts have similarly heavily focused on Swinson. Yet it’s not just the polls that suggest this may have been a mistake. I was recently surprised by conversations I had with a group of pro-Remain, and generally sympathetic to the Lib Dem voters in key target seats including Putney and Twickenham who named Swinson herself as a problem. A couple went so far as to call her an ‘extremist’ because of her pledge to revoke Article 50, a description that is at odds with the party’s efforts to depict her as the only reasonable person in British politics.

It is perhaps difficult for those working on the party’s campaign to fully appreciate this. Many of them have quite an emotional connection to Swinson, having effectively watched her grow up in the party.

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