Younger readers may not believe me, but we used to take the Lib Dems seriously, or at least more seriously. Leaders of the party – Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy, Nick Clegg – were, if not wildly popular or successful, unthinkingly assigned in the public mind to the same bracket of status as the Labour or Tory leaders.
After about 30 years of progressives trashing the nation, and sneering at its heritage and culture, they now expect us to rush lustily to its defence
Today’s five-way split in British party politics (six if you count the SNP, seven if you count Restore) is disconcerting in many ways. The flailing of both Labour and the Tories should, in the normal course of things as we understood them, have sent people scurrying to the Lib Dems. But they are polling on average at only about 10 per cent, frequently coming fourth or even fifth.
Today is the final day of their conference, but nobody has been paying very much attention. It is hard to focus your mind on today’s Lib Dems. Your focus keeps slipping away from them, like a TV show you think you are watching until you realise you’ve been tapping at your phone for half an hour.
Andy Burnham, like Starmer before him, is very lucky in his opponents. The trifold division of the right means Labour have, incredibly, reestablished a slim polling lead. By rights, the government should be down to about the same 4.9 per cent achieved by Friedrich Merz in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and the Lib Dems should be making hay. But no.
In an age of repulsive or infuriating politicians, Ed Davey is merely laughable. Although his fellow Lib Dems don’t seem to have noticed how ineffectual and ineffective he is. Only Julian Brazil, the splendidly named leader of Devon County Council, has spotted the problem, telling the BBC at the weekend that the party was ‘sleepwalking into irrelevance,’ ‘lacking ambition’ and ‘not saying the things that people can relate to’. Asked if Davey was the right leader for the party, Brazil replied ‘I wish he was’ but ‘all the evidence is no’.
But even this outburst hardly seemed to register. Nobody else took up the cudgel, and nobody else rushed in to defend Davey. This is a strong sign that nobody cares about the Liberal Democrats – not even the Liberal Democrats.
It is, in fact, very hard to keep your mind on Ed Davey for long enough to develop an opinion. An eccentric teacher of mine, instead of setting lines for punishment, made you write thousand-word essays on subjects like ‘the inside of a ping-pong ball’ or ‘a single piece of cress’. Thinking about Ed Davey gives me the same sensation. Even his supposedly daft antics – falling into water or dad dancing – are neither interesting nor endearing. His unctuous grovelling towards Burnham, like his transparent toadying to Starmer is merely grim.
In fact, the only thing of interest to have emerged during the party’s autumn conference came from its defence spokesperson James MacCleary – me neither –who urged the government to create a register for volunteers willing to fight for King and country. He argued that Britain urgently needs an organised network of civilian volunteers, and that politicians should be more direct with the public about security threats.
This may be true, but coming from the Lib Dems – who have, of course, been cheerleaders for every progressive move that has left us so vulnerable – it is hilarious. Imagine a rag-tag fighting force with the Lib Dem aesthetic – a Centrist Dad’s Army, with valorous hearts determined to defend every last centimetre of the dear old homeland, for the great modern British values of Pip, debt, cannabis clouds, pronouns, and chaps mopping kitchen floors in silly adverts. The Kremlin will be terror-stricken.
After about 30 years of progressives trashing the nation, and sneering at its heritage and culture, they now expect us to rush lustily to its defence. ‘Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”’? More like ‘Cry “God for net zero, Prince Harry and Deliveroo!”’
This is all quite funny in the abstract, until you remember that the threat is real, and that you’ll be in the middle of it, if and when it escalates. The Lib Dem version of the A Team might be all that stands between us and a swarm of Russian drones. Still, at least we’ll get a laugh as we go.
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