On the afternoon of 14th September, the BBC reported, Ed Davey arrived at the Liberal Democrats’ autumn conference by jet ski. Most of us making the largely overland journey from London to Brighton would probably do it by train; but as Lib Dem leader, Davey has perfected the art of the low-dignity, high-attention stunt. On a screen in a neglected corner of the Brighton Centre, a highlights reel of the recent election campaign was playing on a loop. Ed on a rollercoaster, screaming happily. Ed at an aquatic dancercise class, waving a pool noodle. Ed befriending an alpaca.
It worked: a wonkish party that has sometimes struggled to get attention was suddenly everywhere. Davey himself, meanwhile, has sidestepped being characterised as just another career politician with an Oxford PPE degree—or worse, the coalition postal affairs minister who failed to address the Post Office scandal. Instead, he became a sort of national “embarrassing dad” figure, winning himself the space to talk about the issues about which he feels genuinely passionate, such as the experience of caring for his disabled son, John. The line, found almost by accident but honed over the course of the campaign, was that Davey could take the issues seriously without doing the same with himself.
So the party that gathered from 14th to 17th September in Brighton was in the best mood it’s been in for years. Not only had the Liberal Democrats regained their traditional status, lost to the SNP in 2015, as the third largest group in the Commons; the party now has, as another slide on rotation in the corridors periodically announced, “the most Lib Dem MPs EVER”.
“It’s one thing to know that 72 is a big number,” party president Mark Pack tells me. “But it’s only when you’re at an event like this, when you keep bumping into new MPs, that you really see it.”
The question now is whether the party has reached the peak of its success—or merely the foothills of something even bigger. The Conservative party is “so far removed from the real lives of ordinary people that it no longer merits a place at the top table of our politics”, Davey—a former coalition minister and "Orange Booker", seen as on the right of the party—said as he took to the stage in the final hours of the conference. “Our job is to consign the Conservative party to the history books.” It’s a sign of strange times, in which the Lib Dems have only 49 fewer MPs than the Tories, that this line is not ipso facto ridiculous.
There are two things that make the Lib Dem conference surprisingly fun to attend, but which also, perhaps, raise questions about whether the party could really take the next step and overtake the Tories. One is that, as Davey’s campaign suggests, there is something almost gleefully silly about the way it does business. Gaining access to Labour or Tory conferences generally involves long queues to go through airport-style metal detectors run by unsmiling private security people. Gaining access to the Brighton Centre, though, involved little more than a brief bag search and a mock serious, “Any biscuits?” (Sadly not.)
Inside, there were rather fewer people in EU flag berets than in recent years, and a disappointing absence of the laminated pictures of party elders I’d once found for sale. In the exhibition hall, though, someone had illustrated the Lib Dem strategy in the form of a giant domino run, a single yellow domino poised to take out an entire line of blue ones (previous efforts have involved giant clocks and a yellow bulldozer and a blue wall). Meanwhile, a blow-up of the most recent edition of Liberator magazine—not officially associated with the party—showed a pair of empty deckchairs in front of Brighton’s burned-out West Pier. The caption said: “I hear it’s the Tories’ next conference venue.” I was just contemplating the fact that evenings at Lib Dem conference involve an unnerving amount of communal singing when someone asked if I was going to the berry grower industry reception.
The party might not take itself particularly seriously, but it treats its policy debates intensely so. Members address the hall in roughly the same tone as Lincoln would have addressed Gettysburg, warning their fellow attendees against failure to vote down amendment two to motion F29 as though western civilisation is at stake. Those who announce they are addressing conference for the first time will be greeted with applause; on occasion, I’ve noticed, it’s proved possible to win applause at the Lib Dem conference simply by announcing that you are a Lib Dem.
This often results in other absurdities, such as the man who made an impassioned speech demanding a policy on Taiwan, as though the main thing necessary to restrain Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea was a good firm line from the party, or (this has happened) furious arguments about the existence of a single comma. But the party’s commitment to internal democracy means that these debates do actually—in so far as one could say this of anything involving the Liberal Democrats—matter. Conference is where the manifesto is written; the leadership can lose. In 2023, Davey attempted to scrap the party’s housing targets on the grounds that they’d make it slightly more embarrassing to run Nimby campaigns. He lost, by a landslide. The target stayed.
That’s the other reason why the conference is genuinely fun to attend: it offers tension and surprises in exactly the way the more stage-managed gatherings of the two larger parties do not. It’s not clear these are qualities you necessarily want in a party of government, however. Geoff from Worthing should probably not be setting foreign policy.
This year’s debates were, in any case, a damp squib. There were no big bust-ups with the leadership. (“Ed’s won the right to do pretty much whatever he wants,” one veteran member told me.) Even the emergency debate on a motion of support for Gaza saw impassioned contributions from all sides greeted with polite applause, before the motion passed overwhelmingly.
“The truth is it’s just more fun when you’re asking how the party can possibly come back from this,” complained one lobby reporter, “rather than writing about how they have.”
In the vain hope of some drama, I spent the Sunday night trawling the bars and backrooms of the Grand hotel. Outside Alistair Carmichael’s whisky night, a member of the Young Liberals gleefully told me that there very nearly had been a fight—but that it had all been resolved by the compositing committee (there are a lot of committees), and thus had not made it to the conference floor. In a different room, I found a chunk of the media looking shell-shocked in the latter stages of an interminable quiz, involving matching new MPs with their constituencies or guessing the size of their majority. On a table were a series of Morph-like creatures, the product of an earlier round. “Ed Clay-veys,” someone explained. One of them had tiny yellow genitalia.
What of the strategy being pursued by the real, full-sized Ed Davey? In the immediate future, aides say, the core themes will be those familiar from the campaign when, whether fondling a chicken or soaked to the skin on a waterslide, he talked ceaselessly about the sewage in Britain’s waterways and the cost of living crisis—issues about which Middle England voters who would never vote Labour might still feel genuine fury. The struggles faced by professional and unpaid carers alike, people who rarely feel heard by Westminster, will also remain prominent. The video of Davey caring for John was mentioned, unprompted, by voters more often than any other bit of the party’s comms in living memory.
The big addition, though, will be the state of the NHS. Labour will not be able to fix the mess it’s inherited any time soon; the Tories will struggle to land blows when everyone knows the mess is their fault. That leaves a gap in the market. Other key lines from Davey’s closing speech included, “the NHS and care crisis” and “it was a Liberal, William Beveridge, who invented the NHS”. As one aide working in the leader’s office told me happily, “Someone complained that every day at this conference was health day.” He was delighted, he added, that his boss had received a call on a phone-in demanding to know why the party only ever seemed to talk about the NHS. Once upon a time, that complaint would have been about the words “Brexit” or “Iraq”.
The party is well positioned to keep punching this bruise. As the leader of the third party once again, Davey will be guaranteed two questions at PMQs every week, rather than the one every five the Lib Dems have been stuck with since 2015. Meanwhile, Layla Moran, MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, is now chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee. Expect to hear a lot about being a “critical friend” to the government, criticising not just its failure but its lack of ambition. The Lib Dems are not angry; they’re just disappointed.
All this, though, feels a lot like attacking the government from the left, which seems an awkward fit with Davey’s ambitions to displace the centre-right party in British politics. It’s an odd fit, too, given that the parliamentary party is now overwhelmingly dominated by southern “blue wall” seats won from the Conservatives. Of the party’s next 20 targets, just two are held by Labour; the others are all held by Tories. Winning Godalming and Ash (swing required: 0.8 per cent) or Farnham and Bordon (1.3 per cent) will involve playing up all the ways in which the party isn’t somewhere to the left of Labour. Opposition to the introduction of VAT on private schools, for instance, or to Labour’s planning reforms as a threat to the green belt.
Once upon a time, the party was intensely relaxed about running radically different campaigns in different areas. It could be pro-housebuilding in urban seats and anti-development in more rural ones. Changes to national funding rules, though, mean more campaign materials are now being produced centrally, which pushes the party towards a more unified message with Davey’s face on it. Councillors and activists from cities are already starting to worry about the party’s lack of interest in issues that most affect their communities, such as poverty, crime and housing.
“School fees just aren’t going to matter in seats like mine, because nobody pays them,” says one inner city councillor. “In my ideal world, we’re a socially liberal, economically centrist party which champions young people,” says another member from London. “If not, I suspect that in 10 years’ time, I’m likely to be a Green.”
The Lib Dems may not currently look like a party that could fill the space on the centre-right vacated by the Tories—but perhaps, over time, they could change to become so. The size of the MP payroll vote means that the leadership should win every contested conference vote for the next five years, said the veteran activist. “What I think is most likely is that party stalwarts become a bit annoyed at losing these votes and so conference attendees look more and more pro-Davey over time.” That might mean the party becomes a better fit for the Tory-shaped hole on the centre-right.
This could be a failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t see it. Partly because the members are broadly centre-left; partly because they’re a stubborn bunch, and I can’t imagine them ceding their party. But also because they are ever so slightly—there’s no other way of putting this—weird.
The social highlight of Lib Dem conference—I use the term loosely—is Monday night’s Glee Club. This, to be clear, is not to be confused with the “Conference Communioke” group singalong to pop songs, which I blagged my way into on Sunday night, only to regret it when I realised I couldn’t leave again without offending the recent parliamentary candidate who’d been kind enough to sneak me in. I was stuck there for the better part of an hour. No, Glee Club is far, far weirder. It involves classic songs completely rewritten to be about British politics, then sung in a brightly lit room in the manner of a school choir. You can buy your own copy of the ever-growing songbook from Liberator, if you want to sing along.
Some of the songs are about the party’s opponents: the one about David Cameron and the pig incident, sung to the tune of “English Country Garden”; the one which rewrites “American Pie” so that the chorus runs “Tony Blair can f- off and die” (something to do with rumours of unification talks in the mid-1990s; a song banned this year, I was told, because of the presence of his institute). The most fun ones, though, are those—“The Twelve Days of Coalition”, “It’s a Sin” (about Tim Farron’s views on gay marriage)—that mock the party itself.
This is not some kind of sideshow, either. This year, a succession of new MPs were brought on stage, ostensibly of their own free will, to sing along. “There’s a lot on my shoulders,” cried new Devon MP Ian Roome, “because in North Devon we had Jeremy Thorpe!” Can there be any other room on Earth in which the name of the 1970s Liberal leader, who campaigned by hovercraft and was found not guilty of incitement to murder, would still raise a cheer? This is the party now hoping to displace the Tories.
Before Davey’s triumphal speech, his deputy, Daisy Cooper, introduced almost the entire parliamentary party. Each member of the 72-strong Lib Dem bench marched onto the stage to cheers, waving their arms. Davey himself walked on to Abba’s “Take a Chance On Me”. Afterwards, as glitter cannons fired yellow-gold confetti, the whole room sang along to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”. Rarely can a party have looked so happy to come third.
Perhaps the Lib Dems’ ideological differences don’t matter. Is their future as a left-liberal party, which won blue wall seats by consolidating the anti-Tory vote? Or is their future a centrist one, a party aimed at those who may have once voted Tory, but who like the EU and a functional state? Who cares? Being all things to all voters has been a successful strategy before: the party won 46 seats in 1997, but climbed to 62 by 2005. “What do we stand for?” one councillor commented. “Eh, we’ll worry about that in four years.”
And the truth is that, despite the sound and the fury of those policy debates, the party’s actual control over its destiny is limited. “Fundamentally, there are two big factors substantially out of our control,” says Pack. “How popular Keir Starmer is, and how popular the new Tory leader is.” The single biggest determinant of whether the Lib Dems could truly replace the Tories is what the Tories do next.
If the purity of the party’s ideological stance doesn’t matter, though, its tone very well might. There’s a big difference between being the third-largest party in parliament and being the opposition. The latter, after all, must also be a potential government. Can you really envision a party that sings hymns every year about having sex with a pig, making this jump? Potential prime ministers don’t arrive by jet ski.
