The Lib Dems need to be less nice

“I’m just losing it really, because of how dreadful this government is”

Six months ago, Ed Davey was a Secretary of State (for Energy and Climate change) in Her Majesty’s Government. Now he’s not even an MP in a party which has so few of them that each has their face on a mug at the conference merchandise stall. Talking to me at the Lib Dem Autumn Conference in Bournemouth, he can only rail against the Tories, his former partners, with little chance of changing their minds. “Opposition sucks,” as Labour’s Yvette Cooper recently said, and it sucks hardest for the Lib Dems, who’ve moved from kingmakers to also-rans in the space of a parliament. But new leader Tim Farron insists that, with Labour moving to the left, there’s space in the centre for his party to fill. What does it need to do to take it?

Plenty of commentators and politicos—who ended up liking Farron’s predecessor Nick Clegg rather more than the voters did—cry that the party is already doomed. It made the wrong choice, they say, in picking charismatic but unpolished Farron over his rival Norman Lamb, the likeable, cerebral former Care Minister. That’s misguided. Lamb is a talented policy thinker, but he’s not an attention-grabber. His speech yesterday, on the NHS, was striking for its damning assessment of the current state of NHS finances and his call for billions of pounds of funding for the service in the next two years. His delivery, though, was flat, chirpy rather than rabble-rousing. “Bless him,” one audience member behind me said as she rose for his obligatory standing ovation. Farron, who is known for his ability to connect with the grass roots and his campaigning energy, will do well enough at keeping new Lib Dem members’ (20,000 have joined since the election) spirits up and rallying them to the cause. For now, that’s needed.

The leadership is in some ways beside the point. Whoever’s in charge, the party faces a deeper problem if it’s to regain votes fast; how to be heard. Farron, for example, took the initiative in July and decided to speak out on the burgeoning refugee crisis earlier than Labour’s Yvette Cooper, whose more modest proposal came in September. He called for the UK to let in 60,000 migrants and even went for a photoshoot in Calais. “There’s not much more [he could] have done,” says Sean Kemp, a former Lib Dem advisor in Number 10, and yet Farron’s stunt went largely unreported outside of a few pieces in sympathetic outlets like the Guardian. A party with eight MPs is necessarily of less interest to the press, who sometimes paid it little heed even when it was helping run the country. On the key British policy debates, politics has mostly reverted to a traditional two-party axis, except where the SNP, with its 56 members and vast Scottish mandate, has managed to leap in, such as on defence and constitutional reform.

One possible solution was trialled by Lamb in a major Observer interview this weekend, when speaking as his party's health spokesperson he originally made his NHS funding claims. His argument—that the NHS is in immediate crisis and needs serious funding now—carried much more weight than a normal minor party’s because it drew on direct experience in government. It’s potentially a rich seam; the Lib Dems, who were inside and now are out, could throw a chink of light on the often chaotic process of government policymaking and earn themselves some anti-Tory coverage in the process. Davey, for example, talks passionately about how the Treasury, in his view, has far too much control over energy policy (“DECC cannot fart without the Treasury saying ‘you can fart,’” he says) which he claims it doesn’t understand. The party’s vocal opposition to Tory plans to scrap the Human Rights Act, which Lib Dems say they resisted in coalition, is another key area.

One issue here is that many Lib Dems have mixed feelings about their former colleagues. Davey, while a vocal critic of the Tory Treasury and of Michael Gove, is full of praise for Amber Rudd, once his junior and now Energy Secretary. Lamb lashed out at former Justice Secretary Chris Grayling in a fringe meeting yesterday but is more mixed on Gove, Grayling’s successor: “[he]’s a radical, there’s no doubt about that. Sometimes I agree with his radicalism, sometimes he’s going off in a different direction,” he tells me. To regain many of their losses, the Lib Dems need to take votes off Labour. That means they need to get comfortable slamming their former partners with everything they’ve got.

In the longer term, the Lib Dems need to find a way to define their centrist position other than in relation to the other parties—Nick Clegg confessed in a speech on Monday that at the election “we made the centre ground sound a bit too much like a tactic, rather than a place rich in values and conviction.” That means finding issues they can own. Drug policy reform is one which comes up in most of my conversations: both Lamb and home affairs spokesperson Alistair Carmichael tell me they’re in favour of speaking in favour of the legalisation or decriminalisation of some drugs. But here the party usually remains cautious and wonkish, talking more about the “evidence” for decriminalisation’s effectiveness and less about the ideas of personal freedom or the advantages for troubled families. Similarly on Europe, while the party's internationalist position is clear, it has been accused of being too rational. “We’re too logical, and we need to get emotional,” says Davey, “I want to make sure that people know if they vote to pull out they’re risking peace, and they’re risking the fight against crime and terrorism.”

There are signs that the Lib Dems are ready to be bold. In today’s conference speech, Farron will say that his party is willing to break with a convention that says peers won’t vote down a policy in a winning party’s manifesto, by voting against the government’s right to buy reform in the Lords. It opens the party up to criticisms of being anti-democratic, but in so doing it grabs them headlines and makes them look gutsy. On balance, it’s the right move.

Are the Lib Dems just too nice for politics? “Well I take that as a compliment,” jokes Lamb, before stressing that “there’s always a tension… you’ve somehow got to articulate your principles very clearly, but you’ve got to demonstrate where you divert from those principles and you do it as an agreement to achieve something that is important to you, and I don’t think we did that well enough.” He’s right, but with more or less nothing to lose, caution will get the party nowhere. It’s time to get out there and fight with all they’ve got. No more mr nice guy.