What should we make of the extraordinary election campaign we’ve just lived through – where, as Rory Stewart said, 99 per cent of Boris Johnson’s cabinet are no longer in Parliament?
My first reaction was that the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey had stolen the show with his combination of honesty and humanity and his wild stunts.
But then I had taken in the Lib Dem share of the vote, which has hardly gone up at all since last we all voted (+0.7%) at the tail end of 2019. Although the Lib Dems have been able to maximise their number of seats – up to 72 – they remain victims of the process, in the sense that – although Davey was the only party leader to gain in his approval ratings during the campaign – little of what they did seems to have changed anything outside their target seats. They may have simply benefitted from the interventions of Reform and Nigel Farage.
Maximising vote share in target seats was, and still is, a great skill. They now have almost what they deserve (proportionally) in share of the seats – and far more than the Greens (on 7%) or Reform (on 14%).
On the other hand, the Lib Dems were definitely helped by Keir Starmer’s handling of the Labour Party in recent years – because he has made Labour safe enough to avoid the risk that otherwise Conservative-minded people, if they flirted with voting elsewhere, would let in a Corbyn or a Foot by the back door.
Turnout has been dropping steadily down to 60 per cent – down from 67 per cent in 2019 – which in turn was down on the 77 per cent in 1997. There may be a great deal of hand-wringing about this. In fact, there is a tendency – when you look at the figures – for fewer people to vote when people are not actually very divided. The two lowest turnouts over the last century or so were 1918 (57%) and 2001 (59%). The highest turnouts in recent years were in 1950 (84%), when the nation was deeply divided politically, in 1959, in February 1974 (79%), and in 1992 (78%).
So there seems to be some kind of congruence between voter turnout and uncertainty and how hard fought the election has been.
The problem with politicians is that they tend to believe that when they win, they win – permanently. But it isn’t like that at all. So, looking a little further ahead, towards the next election, Starmer may be as safe as Blair was in 2001 or just as safe as he was in 2005 (not very). Perhaps with an even lower turnout.
We should expect more talk about new centre parties – especially if the Tories reach some kind of accommodation with Farage; parties that might provide some hope of mopping up the Penny Mordaunts, the Rory Stewarts and the Michael Heseltines – who may now feel politically homeless. Stewart voted Lib Dem this time – or so he told his weekly broadcast with Alastair Campbell – but I can’t see Heseltine taking that kind of leap of faith, let alone Mordaunt.
The real question I ask myself is what the Lib Dems should do to become the official opposition after the next election in 2029, which surely must be their objective.
That will require them to carry on being sensible, reasonable and calm at least – and pro-European – to try to prevent a merger between the two or three wings of the Conservative party.
I have two small pieces of advice to the Lib Dems, which may sound as if they conflict with that objective – but actually I don’t think they do in practice.
First, they should get closer to the Greens, who will otherwise carry on nibbling away at their new heartlands in the Muesli Belt. What is the Muesli Belt, I hear you ask? Well, it was a concept of my old friend Martin Stott, in his 1986 book Spilling the Beans. He meant the great swathe of land around the home counties, a massive curve from Dorset to Norfolk – which were the the fastest growing in the UK back then, fuelled partly by the downshifting revolution.
The Lib Dem success has made the Muesli Belt obvious again, but there are now important gaps where the Greens increased their vote considerably, letting Labour in – like Cambridge or Norwich South, both of which the Lib Dems held until 2015.
It was also where the Greens, led by Jonathon Porritt and with Liz Crosbie at the campaign controls, came second in the 1989 Euro-elections all the way along it – and nowhere else.
And if they are to get closer to the Greens, then it has to happen at local level first.
My other piece of advice is that they need to look and learn from the innovative campaign being run by a third party candidate in the US presidential election: Robert F. Kennedy Junior.
I say this because of the huge mountain he has to climb to break through and how far he has come so far. But also the way in which he has transformed his campaign into a crusade – by picking a number of issues that neither Biden nor Trump want to discuss, like the corporate capture of the regulators and the massive subsidies paid to US oil companies.
He asks good questions too. Like how come, in this – the richest nation on earth – so many children are quite so sick?
Kennedy Jr still has a mountain to climb, but then so do the Lib Dems. And, in the end, my main takeaway from the election is that political parties which transform their campaigns into crusades lodge themselves in the minds of voters.
Where the Lib Dems won, they crusaded on issues such as sewage and mental health services. It is what the Greens have always done as well on the environment, and it is what – with Farage talking about whom he will devour next – Reform is clearly doing already. The Lib Dems just need to be cleverer.
