Rather like Sir Keir Starmer, Sir Ed Davey inherited a thoroughly broken party in 2020 when he became leader.
Also rather like Sir Keir, if the polls and polling projections are to be believed, Sir Ed has brought the party to the brink of a remarkable comeback, reversing the deep losses bequeathed by Nick Clegg in 2015 after five years of coalition.
The made-for-TV election stunts may look bold, but Sir Ed’s plan has been cautious and incremental.
Nothing bold on Brexit, which was the signature of the party’s 2019 campaign. No pretence that Sir Ed could be prime minister after the election, as Jo Swinson pretended in 2019 – this is a campaign targeted in seats the party thinks it can win.
Instead we have a campaign of reassurance from a party that abandoned “equidistance” – holding Labour and Tory at similar distance which led to five years of coalition with the Tories until 2015 – and turning them into a purely anti-Tory force, more in tune with many activists’ inclinations.
Now the party could be about to quadruple its seats. This could put it on course to returning as the third biggest party in the Commons, regaining the crown from the ailing Scottish National Party, its biggest achievable goal for the 4 July election.
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Yet Sir Ed has brought the Lib Dems to this point while leaving unresolved some big questions about both the past and the future.
First, he simply refuses to deal with the past. Sir Ed was a minister and cabinet secretary in the coalition government all the way from 2010 to 2015.
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2:50
Can voters trust Lib Dems’ manifesto?
That means he was in the government that cut tens of billions from public services and squeezed the NHS – causing damage which his party at this election is now promising to fix.
But will he concede mistakes were made? I pushed him six times in an interview today over whether he would disown or endorse the £40bn of cuts announced by the coalition in 2010, and every time he sidestepped the question.
Political parties can make promises at election time but – rather like the Lib Dems and tuition fees in 2010 – these can be broken and the past can provide a better guide to post election behaviour.
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Having turned the Lib Dems into a Tory-fighting force, we are now just weeks away from the potential of a Tory wipeout.
What do the Lib Dems do then? What’s the impulse of the hordes of new Lib Dem MPs? Do they attack Sir Keir’s Labour – something Sir Ed has assiduously avoided doing to date? Or do they work with them?
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Davey refuses to say austerity was a mistake
I asked Sir Ed what would become of the 114-page fully costed manifesto, given a Labour landslide would render their influence minimal in the next parliament.
Sir Ed answered, perhaps a little implausibly, that a Labour government might take ideas on things like the NHS from his party’s manifesto, just as he claimed Gordon Brown did with Bank of England independence in 1997.
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The Battle for Number 10, a UK Election Leaders’ Special Event, will air from Grimsby on Sky News on Wednesday.
Let’s see – a Labour government led by Sir Keir would feel no political necessity to borrow from the Lib Dems. More likely relations between the two parties gradually deteriorate.
None of this matters for now. Sir Ed has managed to combine his own unique personal story about caring for his disabled son now and his dying mother as a teenager, with a manifesto designed to appeal to one-time Tories.
This could prove a popular tactic on 4 July. He probably thinks what comes next can wait.
Merseyside Police knows – better than any force, perhaps – that in a social media age, an information vacuum can become a misinformation cauldron.
They have learnt from the aftermath of the Southport stabbing attack, where the force was criticised for being too slow to release information that could have calmed the riots that followed.
So, it feels like things have been done differently this time.
Image: Police tents surrounded by debris at the scene in Water Street. Pic: PA
The incident happened just after 6pm on Monday.
Videos – captured by fans on their phones – were online within moments. Shared and speculated upon, with guesses as to the attacker’s identity and motive.
But alongside the huge and immediate police investigation, the communication machine moved equally fast.
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Within a few hours, police released a description of the man they had arrested – a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area.
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Moment car drives into crowds in Liverpool
A few hours after that, we had an extensive press conference during which police ruled out terrorism as a motive.
Again, they appealed for videos not to be shared online and for people not to speculate.
Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram said Merseyside Police “handled the situation fantastically” given how quickly footage of the incident was shared online.
He told Sky News that online misinformation can set “a lot of false narrative”.
The mayor added: “And we all know that speculation and social media are a wildfire of different vantages, and some of it is for nefarious reasons.
“So, it was right, of course, that the police reacted as quickly as they did to dampen down some of the types of posts that we were witnessing, you know, saying that there were other things happening throughout the city.”
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Police commentator Graham Wettone also told Sky News the force had done well to quickly combat misinformation spreading online.
He said: “That’s always a problem in today’s day and age, social media taking over so much news reporting, with so many people as well present at the scene where that awful incident took place, mobile phones out, people recording it, and then posting it almost straight away.”
Dal Babu, a former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent, also highlighted it was “unprecedented” that the force “very quickly” gave the ethnicity and race of the suspect.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, he said: “I think that was to dampen down some of the speculation from the far-right that sort of continues on X even as we speak that this was a Muslim extremist and there’s a conspiracy theory.”
Mr Babu agreed that Merseyside Police appears to have learned lessons from what happened after the Southport stabbings.
He added: “The difficulty we have is in the olden days, when I was policing, you would have a conversation with trusty journalists, print journalists, radio journalists, broadcasting journalists, you’d have a conversation and say look can you please hold fire on sharing this information and people would listen.
“We don’t have that with social media, it’s like the Wild West and anything goes and so puts the police in a very, very difficult position.”
Meanwhile, the police investigation continues.
In central Liverpool, Water Street is cordoned off with police officers and vehicles in place.
Flags, sprays of paint flares and empty bottles still cover the road. Whereas they have been cleared elsewhere along the parade route, here they remain. Chilling symbols of the party, that within moments became a scene of utter horror.
King Charles and Queen Camilla are being urged to use their visit to Canada to seek an apology for the abuse of British children.
Campaigners have called on them to pursue an apology for the “dire circumstances” suffered by so-called “Home Children” over decades.
More than 100,000 were shipped from orphan homes in the UK to Canada between 1869 and 1948 with many used as cheap labour, typically as farm workers and domestic servants. Many were subject to mistreatment and abuse.
Canada has resisted calls to follow the UK and Australia in apologising for its involvement in child migrant schemes.
Image: King Charles and Mark Carney on Monday. Pic: PA
Campaigners for the Home Children say the royal visit presents a “great opportunity” for a change of heart.
“I would ask that King Charles uses his trip to request an apology,” John Jefkins told Sky News.
John’s father Bert was one of 115,000 British Home Children transported to Canada, arriving in 1914 with his brother Reggie.
“It’s really important for the Home Children themselves and for their descendants,” John said.
“It’s something we deserve and it’s really important for the healing process, as well as building awareness of the experience of the Home Children.
“They were treated very, very badly by the Canadian government at the time. A lot of them were abused, they were treated horribly. They were second-class citizens, lepers in a way.”
John added: “I think the King’s visit provides a great opportunity to reinforce our campaign and to pursue an apology because we’re part of the Commonwealth and King Charles is a new Head of the Commonwealth meeting a new Canadian prime minister. It’s a chance, for both, to look at the situation with a fresh eye.
“There’s much about this visit that looks on our sovereignty and who we are as Canadians, rightly so.
“I think it’s also right that in contemplating the country we built, we focus on the people who built it, many in the most trying of circumstances.”
The issue was addressed by the then Prince of Wales during a tour of Canada in May 2022. He said at the time: “We must find new ways to come to terms with the darker and more difficult aspects of the past.”
On Tuesday, the King will deliver the Speech from the Throne to open the 45th session of Canada’s parliament.
Camilla was made Patron of Barnardo’s in 2016. The organisation sent tens of thousands of Home Children to Canada. She took on the role, having served as president since 2007.
Buckingham Palace has been contacted for comment.
A spokesperson for the Canadian government said: “The government of Canada is committed to keeping the memory of the British Home Children alive.
“Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada deeply regrets this unjust and discriminatory policy, which was in place from 1869 to 1948. Such an approach would have no place in modern Canada, and we must learn from past mistakes.”
The policy means most families cannot claim means-tested benefits for more than their first two children born after April 2017.
Ms Phillipson’s comments are the strongest a minister has made about the policy potentially being scrapped.
Analysis by The Resolution Foundation thinktank over the weekend found 470,000 children would be lifted out of poverty if parents could claim benefits for more than two children.
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However, Ms Phillipson said the government inherited a “really difficult situation” with public finances from the Conservative government.
“These are not easy or straightforward choices in terms of how we stack it up, but we know the damage child poverty causes,” she added.
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Why did Labour delay their child poverty strategy?
The education secretary, who is also head of the government’s child poverty taskforce, said ministers are trying to help in other ways, such as expanding funded childcare hours and opening free breakfast clubs.
She said it is “the moral purpose of Labour governments to ensure that everyone, no matter their background, can get on in life”.
Her “personal mission” is to tackle child poverty, she said.
Sir Keir Starmer is said to have privately backed abolishing the two-child limit and requested the Treasury find the £3.5bn to do so, The Observer reported on Sunday.
The government’s child poverty strategy, which the taskforce is working on, has been delayed from its original publication date in the spring.
Whether to scrap the two-child benefit cap is one of the main issues it is looking at.