Can Reform revive the Lib Dems? Ed Davey’s buffoonery is no match for Farage

“Stop being so flippy, and squeamish, and English,” Tim Farron exhorted from the main stage of the Liberal Democrats’ conference, his spindly frame engulfed by a St George’s flag. “Join me in reclaiming our flag!” Delegates reluctantly fluttered their own little flags back at him as “Land of Hope and Glory” cheerily poured from the speakers.

Reform’s emergence as a government-in-waiting has stirred an out-of-sorts patriotism in Britain’s pallid centre-left as it attempts to present a vision of Britain and Britishness to compete with Nigel Farage’s insurgent one. “The battle in the next election is between us and Reform,” their leader Ed Davey told the conference. And indeed, the whole event was coloured by the idea that there is no more Left and Right, only Liberal and Reform. If “the Nationalists” intended on hoisting flags on A-roads, then the Lib Dems would jolly well get theirs out too.

For four chilly days in the Bournemouth International Centre, the Lib Dems spoke of little but the threat the “Nationalists” — that incongruous troop of Reform voters, Tommy Robinson supporters and the occasional stray Tory — posed to “British values”. But they struggled to conjure a positive and distinct vision of Britishness in response.

Instead, in a clownish attempt at middle-class populism, Davey invoked a Britain of “Lionesses”, “cricket pavilions”, and “Male Voice choirs” — a post-twee, reactionary, commuter-belt idyll. And Farage is at the gate. In an attempt to frighten the Lib Dems into action, their leader painted an alternative picture of the country where Reform has the whip hand. Where Reform would roll back gun laws until “schools have to teach our children what to do in case of a mass shooting”. They’ll let Elon Musk expose your kids to porn. They’ll turn your son into Andrew Tate. They’ll denigrate the countryside with fracking and untrammelled development. And, worst of all, they’ll privatise the NHS. “That is Trump’s America,” Davey said. “Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.”

“Reform is the most serious threat liberalism has ever faced, and we have to put all our effort into beating that,” Davey said. Yet the irony is that the Lib Dems need Nigel Farage if they hope to have a shot a power. In shattering the old duopoly, Reform has offered the Lib Dems a route to electoral success: mopping up the Tory moderates and Labour progressives, as both parties stagger in a futile pursuit of the Reform vote. In 2024, the Lib Dems won more seats (72) than any third party since the collapse of the Liberal Party more than a century ago, and in May’s local elections, Lib Dems finished second to Reform. But so far it has failed to articulate an alternative vision for government. The latest poll from More in Common has the Lib Dems in fourth place with a meagre 13% of the vote.

Davey has expended much of his mental capacity on Reform’s success. “Here’s the intellectual bit,” he said in a Q&A. “They make people laugh.” And so that is what the Lib Dems must do too. Davey marched through Bournemouth Gardens pursued by a band playing “Sweet Caroline”, he dressed up as a beekeeper, and he had “a blooming good time” planting flowers. And as usual, he didn’t quite pull it off. Farage’s humour isn’t affected in the way that, say, waving a sceptre buffoonishly whilst leading a marching band is. Boris Johnson is, perhaps, the model, but he did that all naturally: no one ever wondered why he was acting like a buffoon.

Davey thinks that “making people smile is the way to win them over”, but the polling disagrees: a majority of voters think his clowning makes the party look unserious and tin-eared. At a time when the electorate has never been so disaffected, when they have a “moral duty” to defeat Reform, and when they’ve never had a better shot at becoming a serious force in British politics, goofing around doesn’t make good policy. It’s just “bullshit”, one MP was reported to have said last week. Besides, it isn’t cutting through. Only a third of Britons can identify Davey’s face, with “Ed Balls” being the most common wrong answer. Those who do know him tend to think he’s just nice. But can “just nice” win an election?

That’s the unavoidable question, especially when it comes to the Lib Dems’ approach to immigration. Not everyone at Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march was a nationalist or racist, Davey said; some just “felt like no one was listening to them”. But are the Lib Dems? Their home affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart seemed flippant at best. She spoke breezily about how migrant hotels are places “where people had their wedding reception… and, of course, [the hotels are] rubbish for the taxpayer”. Elsewhere, for all the Lib Dems’ suggestion that they’d combat Reform with a positive argument for immigration, that petered into some brief mumbling about the economy and the popularity of integration. “There is no harder brief for a liberal [than home affairs],” Smart said, and the Lib Dems seem determined to prove this.

But the delegates need only look outside the conference centre to gauge the problem. Of late, Bournemouth has become one of the most hotly-discussed epicentres of British decline, as photographs of litter-strewn beaches, antisocial behaviour, and Muslims praying circulate amongst the online Right. Local hotels have said that bookings are down as a result of this attention, and a volunteer Safeguard Force has been established in response to a perceived increase in crime. “All towns change,” a taxi driver told me wistfully. “It’s more vibrant than it was. Just, well, different.” As the delegates arrived for the conference, 300 locals joined the “Bournemouth Patriots” to protest against the town’s three migrant hotels. And yet, last month, the Lib Dems beat Reform in a local council ward by-election. Surely if the Lib Dems could win here, one overly confident party member reasoned, they could win anywhere.

“We could certainly see a Lib Dem government,” Kamran Hussain, who was canvassing to be the party’s vice-president, told me. “If we keep on spreading our message, moderate people will come to the Lib Dems in droves.” But how? “Operation Leapfrog” is one means to ensure this: they will target Blue-Wall Tory seats, where they finished third in 2024, such as Central Devon, and Fareham and Waterlooville. And yet all the pollsters seemed to caution against this: “They’ve virtually picked up all the seats they could pick up from the Tories,” said John Curtice, while Luke Tryl, the director of More in Common, said that they’re more likely to attract “Progressive Activists” than One-Nation Tories. But are there any moderates left?

An even greater existential problem for the Lib Dems, if they really are serious about fighting Reform, is that only 24% of voters think they represent change, compared with 51% for Reform. And change is what voters want. But Farage’s Britain is the only future that Davey sees: there was no sense that the Liberal Democrats could change Britain, or especially wanted to. Beyond their dismissal of the “turquoise Tories”, the policies they unveiled could have been implemented by any government since 1997. An energy security bank to offer £10 billion in affordable loans to homeowners and small businesses. Solar panels in supermarket car parks. Health warnings on smartphones. All that was followed by sclerotic debates over ID cards and nuclear energy, and the late-woke silencing of a trans debate via trenchantly polite reference to procedure and “namecalling”. One quiffy-haired Young Liberal told me his party was a “party of fucking nerds”, known for their obsession with forensic policy analysis. And so they were as angry as Liberals can get when, on Monday, the BBC led with Reform’s decision to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain, because, of course, their overnight policy release — a two-hour “doomscrolling cap” for under-18s — was so much more radical.

The trouble is, centrism is a hard sell these days. One evening in the Branksome Suite, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) hosted a fringe event on “disruptive delivery”, where the Lib Dems were urged to assume the mantle of radical centrism. This, they said, is how to beat Farage. Sam Sharps, an ageless technocrat from the TBI, told the party’s deputy-leader Daisy Cooper that “there is no reason why you can’t be radical and sensible… There is no reason why you can’t have a transformational, thought-through, nicely-packaged, costed, implementable policy programme.” That, of course, is what the TBI’s other pet project — the Labour Party — offered with their “fully funded and fully costed” 2024 manifesto: this way lies madness, spending-cuts, tax rises, and an ever-accreting fiscal blackhole.

One disgruntled crowd-member asked them why nobody was speaking about the economy at this conference, and later three other questioners broke into tears: one had lost their seat on a parish council; another’s pub had been bought by the Chinese; another was scared of being a minority in today’s Britain. This is what Britain does to you: it grinds you down until you’re crying in a grey conference room as a think-tanker explains the benefits of bloodless technocracy.

The Liberal Democrats spent four days saying that they would address such griefs, but never did. They can criticise Farage, but they can’t combat him. And try as Davey might to put fire in their bellies, they can only see themselves as an opposition-in-waiting, not a government; they are the new reactionaries who’ll meekly defend the institutions as the Reform party blazes through them. The orders were clear: sharpen your best Farage insults, and prepare yourselves for opposition.

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