Stephen Tall

A truly dire night for the Lib Dems. A net loss of one seat and a net loss of one leader. That was not the hoped-for outcome when Jo Swinson took the gamble of agreeing to Boris Johnson’s pre-Christmas election. So what went wrong? First, this wasn't so much the Brexit election as 'The Brexit Deal election'. If Boris Johnson had gone for his Plan A – a snap election in September threatening no-deal – I think the result would have been very different. Plenty of suburban Remain-leaning Conservative seats would have seriously been in play for the Lib Dems. But the double act of Hilary Benn and Dominic Grieve thwarted the Prime Minister, who was instead forced to the negotiating table. The rest, as they say, is history.

Everyone knows the Lib Dems want to stop Brexit, but that’s not always been true of its voters. Some 750,000 of them backed Leave in the 2016 referendum; one-third of all those who’d voted for the party in the previous year’s general election. One thing’s for sure: Jo Swinson's 'Stop Brexit' campaign is not designed to win these voters back. A recent YouGov poll suggested just four per cent of Leave voters will support the Lib Dems at this election.