Liberal Democrat conference: Davey’s speech featured a powerful human moment – and an electoral calculation | Sam Coates
Sir Ed Davey’s conference speech – his first since becoming leader in the autumn of 2020 – capped what has been a remarkable change in the role of the Liberal Democrats in British politics.
Just eight years ago, Sir Ed was one of the Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers working with the Conservatives around the cabinet table in Number 10.
Today, he couldn’t be more caustic about Rishi Sunak’s party of “clowns”. Once, Lib Dems preached “equidistance” – the ability in a hung parliament to decide whether to put Tory or Labour into Number 10. Now they are making clear they would never put the Tories back in power in the – mathematically improbable – situation they have a choice.
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This means in Bournemouth, the Lib Dems were back firmly on the centre left, the party’s happy place, a position which reflects electoral maths. In the 80 seats where they are second place, there are only two where they fight Labour.
And the issues they chose to focus on – cost of living and health – are the two biggest issues likely to push voters into their column, Lib Dem polling suggests. But Sir Ed needed to cut through the noise and get noticed, leading to one of the most gut-wrenching, difficult passages ever delivered by a party leader in modern times.
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He used his speech to describe the death of his mother from cancer aged 15, following the death of his father when Sir Ed was aged four. The details – how he was in his school uniform by her side on the way to school when she died – were not easy to listen to and evidently not easy to deliver.
It was a remarkably powerful human moment, but since it was delivered on their biggest political platform the party gets all year, there was also crude electoral calculation too. This is an issue they want to be associated with, and they’re having to try harder to be heard as the fourth-biggest force in British politics.
For all the good heart and buoyancy after three days in Bournemouth, it has become clear the party is not really contemplating a massive yellow tide, with regular reminders of the need for caution. The vote in the Brexit-leaning South West, once a heartland, may be inching back to them – it was still ebbing away from them in 2019 – but they are still only looking at winning a total of 15 to 35 seats next year, not the 50 plus they enjoyed between 1997 and 2015.
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It is not likely to be the number that allowed Nick Clegg to negotiate that ultimately toxic coalition deal with the Tories in 2010.
So there has been a conversation on the fringes of Lib Dem conference – frowned upon and sighed at by the leadership – about what to do in the event of a hung parliament, given they have already ruled out playing the two other parties off against one another should that be even possible.
Many believe Sir Ed would never go into another coalition, so scarred is the party, since there is no way of ensuring promises made at the start can actually be delivered. Sir Ed seems scarred to some by failure to get more from the Tories, who he says broke promises. So the discussion is between two other models – could there be a much more limited confidence and supply agreement, where Lib Dems get some political baubles in exchange for backing some bits of Labour’s agenda?
Or should they take a more hardline approach – decide bill by bill, measure by measure, whether to back the Starmer agenda?
Both sides are staring at each other, knowing that if the stakes are raised too high, and discussions fall apart and relations break down, there could be another general election at any point.
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There are those that, when the time comes, will urge Sir Ed to adopt the latter approach.
The Lib Dems first in person autumn conference since 2019 went well on its own terms. The question is how much impact they can have outside this hall.
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Badenoch pulls off first conference speech as leader, but it is less clear if this will be her last
There’s no question that Kemi Badenoch’s on the ropes after a low-energy first year as leader that has seen the Conservative Party slide backwards by pretty much every metric.
But on Wednesday, the embattled leader came out swinging with a show-stopping pledge to scrap stamp duty, which left the hall delirious. “I thought you’d like that one,” she said with a laugh as party members cheered her on.
A genuine surprise announcement – many in the shadow cabinet weren’t even told – it gave the Conservatives and their leader a much-needed lift after what many have dubbed the lost year.
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Ms Badenoch with her husband, Hamish. Pic: PA
Ms Badenoch tried to answer that criticism this week with a policy blitz, headlined by her promise on stamp duty.
This is a leader giving her party some red meat to try to help her party at least get a hearing from the public, with pledges on welfare, immigration, tax cuts and policing.
In all of it, a tacit admission from Ms Badenoch and her team that as politics speeds up, they have not kept pace, letting Reform UK and Nigel Farage run ahead of them and grab the microphone by getting ahead of the Conservatives on scrapping net zero targets or leaving the ECHR in order to deport illegal migrants more easily.
Ms Badenoch is now trying to answer those criticisms and act.
At the heart of her offer is £47bn of spending cuts in order to pay down the nation’s debt pile and fund tax cuts such as stamp duty.
All of it is designed to try to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence, against a Labour Party of tax rises and a growing debt burden and a Reform party peddling “fantasy economics”.
She needs to do something, and fast. A YouGov poll released on the eve of her speech put the Conservatives joint third in the polls with the Lib Dems on 17%.
That’s 10 percentage points lower than when Ms Badenoch took power just under a year ago. The crisis, mutter her colleagues, is existential. One shadow cabinet minister lamented to me this week that they thought it was “50-50” as to whether the party can survive.
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(L-R) Shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith, shadow environment secretary Victoria Atkins and shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly. Pic: PA
Ms Badenoch had to do two things in her speech on Wednesday: the first was to try to reassert her authority over her party. The second was to get a bit of attention from the public with a set of policies that might encourage disaffected Tories to look at her party again.
On the first point, even her critics would have to agree that she had a successful conference and has given herself a bit of space from the constant chatter about her leadership with a headline-grabbing policy that could give her party some much-needed momentum.
On the second, the promise of spending control coupled with a retail offer of tax cuts does carve out a space against the Labour government and Reform.
But the memory of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget, the chaos of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and the failure of Sunak to cut NHS waiting lists or tackle immigration still weigh on the Conservative brand.
Ms Badenoch might have revived the room with her speech, but whether that translates into a wider revival around the country is very hard to read.
Ms Badenoch leaves Manchester knowing she pulled off her first conference speech as party leader: what she will be less sure about is whether it will be her last.
I thought she tacitly admitted that to me when she pointedly avoided answering the question of whether she would resign if the party goes backwards further in the English council, Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd elections next year.
“Let’s see what the election result is about,” was her reply.
That is what many in her party are saying too, because if Ms Badenoch cannot show progress after 18 months in office, she might see her party turn to someone else.
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