The Liberal Democrats could take dozens more seats from the Conservatives at the next general election if the Tories select a leader who keeps pushing them to the right, Lib Dem officials believe.
The prediction came as Ed Davey prepared to attack the Conservatives in his leader’s speech to the Lib Dem conference, saying he wants his party to supplant them at “the top table of our politics”.
Davey’s speech on Tuesday afternoon will close a gathering that has celebrated the Lib Dems’ huge general election success, moving from 15 MPs to 72, while also cementing the rigid message discipline that helped deliver the result.
After a disastrous 2019 election in which the Lib Dems piled up votes around the country but won only 11 seats, a revamped campaign team focused resources on a constantly revised list of target seats, many of them traditional Tory strongholds in “blue wall” commuter belt areas.
Party officials, speaking privately at the conference, said that while the next election was too far away to plan for properly, the expectation was that many more Tory-facing seats could be up for grabs, especially if a new Conservative leader focuses on trying to tempt back former supporters who defected to Reform UK.
“I think we can continue to make further progress against the Conservatives, because I don’t think any of the people who they’re lining up in the leadership contest are going to particularly appeal to the voters we took from them this time,” one said.
“Every indication from the Tories is that they’re going to lean into trying to get votes back from Nigel Farage. And every time they do that, that helps us in the blue wall.”
Virtually all the Lib Dems’ electoral gains in July’s general election came from the Conservatives, and of 27 seats where they finished second, 20 were behind the Tories. In total, Lib Dem candidates were fewer than 10,000 votes from victory in 60 Conservative-held constituencies.
There is confidence that the party can defend the bulk of its new seats, with one newly elected MP saying Liberal Democrats were “like Japanese knotweed” because they were so hard to dislodge once established.
In his speech to the conference in Brighton, Davey is expected to pay tribute to an election campaign in which more than 20m leaflets were delivered and 2.7m addresses were canvassed, almost all in target seats.
Such was the party’s preparedness for an election that within hours of Rishi Sunak calling the snap poll dozens of Lib Dem signboards were up and the first bundles of leaflets were being delivered.
The campaign stuck closely to a handful of issues: the NHS and care, sewage and the cost of living. These have also been the main themes of the conference, with Davey expected to say in his speech that his party will focus on health and care.
He will also attack the Tories, saying: “The Conservatives showed themselves to be totally unfit to govern our country – and the British people rightly booted them out. Now they are already showing that they are unfit for opposition, too.”
Reiterating his hope to “finish the job” of removing Tory MPs from their strongholds, Davey said the lineup of Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly vying to become Conservative leader showed that the party was “scraping the bottom of the barrel”.
He added: “The modern Conservative party is so out of touch with so many of their former voters, so far removed from the real lives of ordinary people, that it no longer merits a place at the top table of our politics.”
