As I watched the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey treat the first week of the general election campaign like an episode of Total Wipeout, I thought of the old joke about a floating voter wandering into Liberal Democrat HQ. “I’d like a copy of your manifesto”. “I am very terribly, sir, but we’ve sold out.” “Everyone knows that! But I would still like a copy of your manifesto!”
Now the theoretical voter has the manifesto. Sir Ed is running on trivia and grins. It is gruesome to type out his campaign strategy, but I do, because politics is not the only thing that has declined in seriousness. At the unveiling of the Lib Dem battle bus, journalists were given prosecco, puzzles and party poppers: a Saga daytrip having a final thrill on the way to the grave.
Sir Ed fell off a paddleboard in Lake Windermere to express agony at sewage. Then he rode a bicycle down a hill in Knighton, Powys, sticking his legs out like the boy in Goodnight Mister Tom, possibly to say something about decarbonisation. Then he went down Ultimate Slip’n’Slide in Frome, Somerset, to — well, I’m not sure.
I knew, or at least I thought I knew: Sir Ed fell off that paddleboard deliberately, or at least he knew it didn’t matter if he did. In Armando Iannucci’s television satire The Thick of It, the gaffe of gaffes was the Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship photographed on a child’s slide, poking the sky for a phone signal. Sir Ed sought that image. He liked it.
This expresses the chief danger of the age, including the climate crisis: we have lived in a democracy so long, we don’t appreciate its fragility or its solemnity, and Donald Trump, who serious people think might demolish the American republic given the chance, is at the end of that road.
Does Sir Ed know this, or does he live inside a self-generated 24-hour news cycle in which he competes with AI? What next? Wife-swapping? (Liberal scandals are the worst. Talk to Cyril Smith’s victims). Nudity? Eating a cockroach?
It’s easy to blame the voters who have, in a never bettered phrase from 1976 film Network, “turned off, shot up and they’ve f***** themselves limp and nothing helps”. But not pandering to the voters’ worst instincts — in this case, ennui and cruelty — is the responsible politician’s job, and what he is paid for.
I felt no merriment watching Sir Ed, just cold-eyed rage that a party leader could treat himself, and us, with such contempt
I felt no merriment watching Sir Ed, just cold-eyed rage that a party leader could treat himself, and us, with such contempt. Why such levity in a declining state? Is the running order of BBC News at Six so important it eclipses everything? None of this surprises me, because I covered the Chesham and Amersham by-election in 2021, when the Lib Dems overturned an enormous Tory majority, which they hope to repeat in other affluent southern areas on July 4.
They are not bold — is anyone these days? — but offer, rather, an unthreatening conservatism with levity, with niceness, to the bourgeoisie. This by-election was one of the earlier nails in Boris Johnson’s coffin and he, king of the zipwire and the tiny flag, plotted this path.
Johnson was our first entirely trivial politician, and Sir Ed has none of his ragged charm. That is, he is impersonating an idiot for likes and, once you’ve gone there, you can’t go back. It was the HS2 election, or the pothole election, and Lib-Dem posters were placed by notorious potholes.
After 10 years of austerity, and in a constituency so monied the charity shops have wedding hat sections, Tories voted Lib Dem for their gardens and their tyres. I could feel the giddiness in their transgression, and I feel it in Sir Ed’s infantilism and irresponsibility, as he assumes the mantle of poster-boy for the attention deficit age.
You see this cynicism elsewhere in Lib-Dem politics, particularly in their will to Nimby. Everyone likes a view, but a country without homes will not stay a functioning country, and this is such an obvious point there is almost nothing left to say.
Except this: the Liberal Democrats have been a serious party. They alone opposed the Iraq War, they have been good on inequality, and valuable on civil liberties. At their best they can show us the way. Why don’t they?
