The Rise of Ed Davey

From my vantage of viewing the Liberal Democrat leadership contest askance, Layla Moran certainly had the momentum. She was a fresh face, of sorts, young, and fairly radical in the twee manner liberalism occasionally gets. The endorsements piled up on social media, and even The Sun decided to run a hit piece on her last night. There was wind in her sails, and, and ... she lost. Instead two-thirds of voting LibDem members went for Ed Davey, the very personification of dull, uninspiring politics. But is this what the traditional third party of Westminster politics needs?

Davey's victory speech was so painfully conventional, Ian Murray could have written it. Thanks folks for the vote of confidence, but you're all shit and we need to listen to the electorate more. Well, given Ed's Orange Book background and time served in the Coalition government of old, the LibDems have pronounced a certain direction of travel based on what all the data has told them. And, interestingly, it's one that could be helpful to Labour.

A Layla Moran-led outfit might have presented Labour a few problems. The dropping of some Corbynist policies as Keir Starmer shifted the party in pursuit of the mythical centrist voter would have given her licence to go after Labour's left flank. Whether this would have proven successful is something we will never find out, but it might have given the leadership pause when it came to ditching left wing positions. Remember, triangulation ain't what it used to be. Ed Davey's yellow neoliberalism suggests this threat has retreated somewhat. However, a Moran leadership would have presented her party with some problems of her own: how does a more radical liberal party go down in the areas it can win next time? In the 20 seats the LibDems came closest in 2019, 18 of them are Tory-held. In the 91 seats where they were the runner up, only 11 did not return a Conservative MP. One might suggest the LibDems;s future electoral prospects dodged a bullet by going with Davey.

Hold on a moment. Jo Swinson's ill-fated leadership was many things, but left-wing certainly wasn't one of them. As Davey is from the same wing of the party, won't he also have as grim a time of it by taking them to the right? Possibly, but more likely not. Under Tim Farron and, to an extent, Uncle Vince, the thinking was Labour's socialist turn under Corbyn had opened up political space on the centre left. Well-meaning bleeding heart types for whom the red party were too red could instead turn the new social justice friendly LibDems in their millions. It was a bad misreading of the politics and the party did worse in vote terms in 2017 than 2015. But the LibDem bigwigs didn't need a pipeline to a certain left-wing blog that was saying they were on a hiding to nothing at the time - they just had to pay attention to what their council by-election results which were telling them. Time after time, the Tories were proving more vulnerable to LibDem challenges and so it made sense to go after them instead of concentrating their fire on Labour.

From the perspective of now, Jo Swinson appears something of a transitional leader. On the centre right of the party, her instincts about where the political profits lay accorded with the data. On this point she was much more astute than Uncle Vince, but she was waylaid by the immediate gains that could be made from the crisis in the Labour Party. There was the opportunity of rapidly expanding the parliamentary party by first going hard on Corbynism, and then pitching the LibDems as the party of Remain. The latter helped clean up in the EU elections and destroy any possible space for our friends Change UK, and then induced them to split with a handful of its MPs hopping aboard a Liberal Democrats now appearing to go somewhere. Then Swinson made the catastrophic decision to adopt the Revocation of Article 50 as the selling point of the manifesto. Not for the first time, she mistook Westminster as the only place where politics happens. Her Commons strategy became the election strategy. This mistake was an authoritarian move. And, as recently confirmed, helped alienate a swathe of voters her party needed to win over. If that wasn't bad enough, she echoed Tory attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and alienated remain-minded progressive voters by putting stopping Corbyn before stopping Brexit. And we won't mention the narcissistic campaign cribbed from Hillary Clinton's leftovers.

Swinson was formally targeting the right, but aped them by punching left and luxuriating in the spotlight parliamentary arithmetic afforded. The vote went up but the seats didn't, and she took her leave from parliament at the hands of the SNP. Hubris and Nemesis, eh? At this early stage, Davey isn't offering Swinsonism without Swinson, but something more plodding. As his last article prior to the results shows, his target is the Tories. There's no residual EUphilia, or the temptation to have a go at Labour, and a cult of the personality is an obvious non-starter. Indeed, his dullness might lead some to think few things separate Sir Ed from Sir Keir, but they do share a community of interest. To tackle the Tories and disrupt their base, both have to concentrate on them and not each other. Think the arrangement like the de facto understanding between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown prior to 1997. In that sense, despite Davey's awful politics, his election might just have made his party more competitive in a swathe of Conservative-held seats. And so, for this very narrow reason, the Tories can sleep a little less soundly tonight.