Sir Ed Davey has the seats of some of the top Conservative cabinet ministers in his sights at the next UK general election with the leader of the Liberal Democrats convinced his party can benefit from the Tories’ ‘move to the right’.
The leader of Britain’s third-largest party by vote share is hoping to oust chancellor Jeremy Hunt, housing secretary Michael Gove and education secretary Gillian Keegan at the election expected later this year, in what he termed a “once in a generation” event.
Speaking to the Financial Times ahead of his party’s spring conference in York this weekend, Davey claimed his party was poised to win over swaths of “Theresa May Conservatives”, moderate voters who despaired of what he claims is a Tory rightward shift on issues such as migration and social affairs.
He said such was the disillusionment with the ruling party — which has been mired in a racism row this week — that the electoral map could be redrawn by defecting Tory voters. “Sometimes you get a feel that the political geography could change quite significantly and I feel that.”
Davey is expecting to make gains across the so-called Tory “blue wall” — traditional Conservative strongholds — particularly winning over voters in the south and south-west. “For some, it’s the memory of the Brexit referendum and how they were treated . . . others just feel the Tories have really moved to the right,” he said.
“You might call it the Theresa May Conservative — I think those types of Tories will vote for us next time,” he added, referring to the former prime minister, who was ousted by the right wing of the Tory party in 2019 and replaced with Boris Johnson.
Davey refused to disclose how many seats the Lib Dems were hoping to win but party officials have privately said they hope to double the number of MPs from 15 to 30.
He admitted the party made a mistake at the 2019 election — when it secured just 11 seats, faring little better than its disastrous performance four years earlier — with unrealistic hopes of big gains that stretched its limited resources too thinly.
This time the Lib Dems had a tightly defined “seats strategy”, he said, which included targeting south-east England constituencies such as Hunt’s in Godalming and Ash, Gove’s in Surrey Heath and Keegan’s in Chichester.
Davey shrugged off opinion polls suggesting the far-right Reform party had overtaken the Lib Dems in popularity across Britain, which suggested 11 per cent and 10 per cent support, respectively.
He will use his conference in York to call for the independent Office for Budget Responsibility to cost each party’s manifesto, to ensure none of them get away with making “rash” unsubstantiated promises in an attempt to woo voters.
He pointed to a similar system in the Netherlands and said an audit was crucial, not least to scrutinise Hunt’s suggestion that a future Conservative government could eventually scrap national insurance contributions, which critics say would cost £46bn a year.
Asked how his party would fund some of its big spending commitments on health, including £5bn a year on a personal care allowance and £800mn on public health grants, Davey said all the policies would be costed carefully.
He pointed to a pledge to restore the banking levy to the level at which it was when it was first introduced after the financial crisis, before successively being cut back by the Conservatives. He claimed this would bring in £4bn a year by 2028-29.
The only Lib Dem MP who served in the coalition government with the Conservatives in 2010-15, Davey’s personal popularity took a hit recently when it was revealed that, as the responsible minister, he failed to act on claims that sub-postmasters were being wrongly accused of theft and false accounting by the Post Office.
But Davey, who was minister for postal affairs between 2010 and 2012, said the fallout from the so-called Horizon scandal was largely a “Westminster bubble thing,” adding: “When I go on the doorstep, no one asks me about it.”
Having spent more than a year trying to distance his party from the debate on Brexit after its fervent pro-Remain stance contributed to its dismal electoral showing in 2019, Davey is now willing to broach the subject again, albeit tentatively.
He said his party would be pushing for a new trade deal with the EU to replace the “appalling” one signed by Johnson when he was prime minister. He added his party’s long-term policy was to rejoin the single market.
“If you don’t put a better trading relationship with Europe in as part of that mix, you’re not going to get the economy sparking again,” he said, though he noted his EU counterparts had been clear that for now “the single market ain’t on the table”.
He rejected suggestions the majority of Britons were unsure about what the party stood for, saying the Lib Dem’s message was clear in its target seats: reducing NHS waiting lists, investing in the care sector and cutting sewage discharges into rivers.
Davey has spoken publicly about his life-long role as a carer and how it had influenced his thinking on the need for dramatic reform. As a teenager, he supported his mother through cancer before she died, his son has a rare neurological disorder and his wife has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“What’s really been encouraging and telling is when I talk to people about it they say ‘that’s me’,” he said. “It gives me a real insight into the lives of millions of people.”
He still thought there was a good chance of a hung parliament, despite Labour enjoying an average 20-point lead in the polls over the Tories.
But he would not make the same mistake as previous Lib Dem leaders who became “too obsessed” about what happened after polling day and spent too much time planning for power-sharing pacts they could make with rival parties.
He would take some convincing on entering a formal coalition with Labour, given the party’s near-death experience after sharing power with David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010.
feed from www.ft.com