How do you feel about that most English of vices: gentle whimsy? Personally, I can’t abide unusually shaped teapots, cat cartoons, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, London Marathon costumes, or jokey books you’re supposed to read on the toilet. For the same reason, I was probably never going to be the ideal recipient of Sir Ed Davey’s electoral campaign — now thankfully concluded. Still: as the sun sets on a Tory government, and Davey shakily regains his land legs after six weeks of plummeting through the air and being catapulted into cold water, it’s worth considering what precedent his extremely strange, babyish campaign set for British politics, and how we might avert its repetition in future.
In the run up to the election, the papers mostly gave Davey an easy ride (as it were), seemingly unwilling to be scathing about what might yet turn out to be the inspired manoeuvres of an emerging national treasure. International media outlets didn’t help, seizing the opportunity to resurrect one of their favourite national stereotypes, the loveable British eccentric. And another factor enabling the horror to hide in plain sight was the general level of cringeworthy memification throughout the campaign, with Dawn Butler rapping, Jeremy Corbyn pretending he knows how to wash a car (or indeed what a car is), and Nigel Farage garnering 8.5 million TikTok views while doing an Eminem impression. Viewed in passing, the Lib Dem approach just looked like more of the same, but in fact it was much worse.
Of course, politics has long included gimmicks from MPs hoping to make a splash: who could forget David Cameron being pulled along by Norwegian huskies in 2006, or the much-derided “Edstone” in 2015? And then there was the biggest and most cunning stunt of all during the 2012 London Olympics: the ne plus ultra of making a self-referential tit of yourself, apparently endearing Boris Johnson to a large part of the public for a generation, and followed up by various daft photo opportunities when he was running for national office. But even those ridiculous exploits were as nothing to the single-minded intensity of the Davey project, which saw him pratfalling in various locations around the country for a full six weeks: not so much offering lots of speeches punctuated by the odd bit of shenanigans, as 90% shenanigans interspersed with occasional bits of chat and weeping to camera about his dead parents.
Some of the appearances were justified by party masterminds as being vaguely connected to a particular policy objective — though, rather like their leader’s Zumba dancing, the explanations given were often a bit of an awkward stretch. Bungee-jumping in Eastbourne was supposed to tempt people into trying something heartstoppingly terrifying for the very first time: namely, voting Liberal Democrat, which seemed to be saying the quiet part out loud. Repeatedly falling from a surfboard into the Cornish foam was allegedly done in order to highlight the problem of sewage in our seas, though the degree of enthusiasm Davey conveyed for the experience tended to suggest exactly the opposite. Careering down a waterslide was about improving mental health for young people — yet it remained unclear how incipient adolescent anxiety would be improved by the sight of a 58-year old political leader perched precariously on a rubber ring, gurning ecstatically like a giant toddler as he hurtled down the slope.
Another explanation for Davey’s behaviour resembled the sort of justification sometimes offered by Just Stop Oil activists or, for that matter, school shooters: namely, it was the only way to get media attention for their cause, otherwise known at Lib Dem HQ as winning the “air war”. This defence would perhaps have worked better had more people been able to work out what the cause was supposed to be, exactly. And in fact — like Farage’s memes on behalf of Reform — the main point of the appearances seemed to be to convey something about the leader in particular, and nothing very specific about his party and their policies at all.
Yet even here, the level of information offered was remedial. We mostly learnt that Davey doesn’t take himself too seriously: “I’m quite happy to have some fun,” he declared, shortly after skidding downhill in Wales on a bike with legs cartoonishly akimbo, just in case anyone had missed the point. Equally, we discovered that behind the smile lies heartache, with several affecting personal tragedies in his past. In a video, interviews, and press releases, Davey saw Starmer’s touching tale of a disabled mother and raised him two dead parents at a young age, a dead Nanna, and a disabled son for whom he has significant caring responsibilities. So heavily was the latter mined for relevance to a manifesto pledge to increase the Carer’s Allowance, it sometimes seemed as if the policy had been designed around Davey personally.
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