It’s easy to be contemptuous of Ed Davey. The Liberal Democrat leader is as poor at watersports as he is at meeting aggrieved postmasters. A man who once called for “tea with the Taliban” and signed off on Hinkley Point C spends each day finding the latest way to humiliate himself in the desperate hope the media notices. He capsized his paddleboard five times in Windermere.
It’s not William Gladstone at Midlothian. Lib Dem leaders have long since swapped posing as Britain’s radical conscience for groveling for attention in any way they can. Paddy Ashdown had an affair, Tim Farron was befuddled by gay sex, and Jo Swinson fantasised about being Prime Minister. Speak of which, Nick Clegg keeps an oar in, even whilst shilling for Meta’s dystopia.
Hence Davey’s aquatic antics. He hopes to highlight sewage discharges. According to Lib Dem figures, more than 100,000 have been released into areas designated for bathing since 2010. Steve Loftus has explained that there are few issues where the popular narrative is more out of line with the reality of the Tory record on water ecology. We did good! Yes, it shocks me too.
But since all politics is vibes, fleets of turds drifting down bucolic country streams are a far more potent image than boring stats about water quality ratings. It is a particularly pressing issue for exactly the sort of disillusioned ‘Blue Wall’ Tory the Lib Dems are targeting. It’s a fashionable outrage for voters who haven’t known real hardship since the great Waitrose prosecco shortage of 2015.
For all my scorn, the humiliation-sewage one-two seems to work for Davey. Yesterday’s YouGov MRP poll had the Yellow Peril winning 40 seats from the Tories, becoming the third-largest party for the first time since 2015. Davey would, at a stroke, have undone the long humiliation of the post-Coalition years. That’s one way to make a splash – turfing out the Chancellor.
Yet this spectacular news was wholly overshadowed in a manner entirely fitting for the Lib Dems. YouGov predicted Labour would win 422 MPs – better than 1997 – and the Conservatives would be reduced to 140. Not only would that be our worst-ever result, but it would see the Tories wiped out across the Red Wall. The polls are not narrowing. They are, if anything, deteriorating.
Even so, the MRP almost underwhelmed. After Electoral Calculus predicted we’d win only 66 seats, 140 seems a good result. That involves ingesting a vast quantity of copium, but a result only marginally worse than 1997 could see the party back in government within a decade. It’s mortifying, but not as lethal as reaching double figures. But wait! Things can always get worse.
According to YouGov’s model, 131 seats are a tossup with the winning party’s lead under five points. The Tories are ahead in 50 of them. YouGov’s vote share had Labour on 43 per cent and the Conservatives on 25 per cent. Politico’s poll of polls has Labour on 45 per cent and us on 23 per cent. If that gap widens further, wipeout beckons. Reality cannot be fooled.
When I raised the prospect of the Tories coming third two months ago, I did it to shock and get bragging rights if my gloomiest nightmares were realised. After yesterday it doesn’t seem impossible. Not only because of YouGov’s data, but because of that great pint-guzzling and cigar-smoking elephant in the room. You didn’t think I was ignoring him, did you? CCHQ hoped they could.
With apologies to Giles Watling, it would be shocking if Nigel Farage did not win Clacton. It voted for UKIP in 2015. For it not to go teal would discredit a decade’s worth of op-eds and academic articles on the right’s realignment, and mean Farage spent three weeks eating kangaroo bollocks for nothing. Eighth time lucky. Mar-a-Largo’s loss is Westminster’s gain, and Richard Tice’s shame.
What prompted Farage to u-turn on his decision? Is Donald Trump too busy being indicted to answer his texts? Has it become so obvious that Tice is a dud that he thought it would be a kindness to replace him? Or is his rationale simply the one he provides in this morning’s Telegraph: he was “reminded of [his] responsibility to…decent, patriot Brits” sick of the political establishment?
His plan? To “lead a revolt”. Keir Starmer’s Labour is “just the different side of the same grubby coin to Sunak’s Tories”. The “state of the nation” has “left [him] with no choice” but to overturn this “ragged Tory party”. He wants to be the Leader of the Opposition. This is the Immigration Election. The Tories have let in some 2.5 million migrants in the last two years. We are ripe for replacement.
The truth that we have betrayed our voters over immigration has been tacitly accepted by the Prime Minister. That is why he is pledging an “immigration lock” – has lock now become the policy equivalent of the -gate suffix? – by capping work and family visas to an annual level determined by the Migration Advisory Committee based on a cost-benefit analysis of immigration’s impact.
Such a proposal shares the analysis of an excellent new paper by the Centre for Policy Studies but lacks its teeth. Applying the cap to only work and family routes ignores half the visas issued last year. Without action on foreign students or seasonal workers, any hope of meeting that long-abandoned tens of thousands target seems utterly ridiculous. This is smoke and mirrors stuff.
Sunak will argue that it is a divide with Labour. That’s true, but only because Starmer will be even worse. Our Deputy Editor pointed out that Labour’s growth hopes make it unlikely they will fight against the CBI-OBR-Treasury axis driving surging numbers. That is especially true under a leader who defended freedom of movement and called immigration restrictions racist.
The road lies open for Farage to pose as the real revolutionary voters are demanding. He will overhang the campaign as readily as his hero Enoch Powell did in 1970 and 1974. Reform’s lack of infrastructure, members, and campaigning expertise make it unlikely to win any more seats than Clacton. But their vote share could tick up and up. How long until a poll has them push us into third?
If that were to happen, not only would CCHQ have a nervous breakdown, but YouGov’s MRP would become a happy high point from which we subsequently collapsed. Jeremy Hunt is already as good as gone. It would only take a five per cent swing on their current prediction for Sunak to join him. Even if not fully Canada 1993, having fewer seats than the Lib Dems becomes likely.
Trapped between the Scylla of Davey and the Charybdis of Farage, the Blue and Red Walls tumbled, we would be bereft and at war. But for the broader right, the situation wouldn’t be hopeless. A third of the country would have voted for right-wing parties only to have two centre-left knights of the realm squaring of across the Commons. Voters would be appalled; the centre could not hold.
It took several election defeats for Canada’s Reform and Progressive Conservatives to realise that a divided right could be continually beaten. The calls over here for a Tory-Reform merger would become louder. The next Conservative leader could well be elected on a platform of admitting Farage into the party. Even as Reform’s only MP, he would demand a hostile takeover.
You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth. The only way for anti-Farage Conservatives to avoid leaving themselves at his tender mercies post-election is to win as many Tory seats as possible. Coming third – in seats behind the Lib Dems, in votes behind Reform – would open the doors to madness: the final crisis of the right-wing entertainment industry.
Dread him, run from him, Farage arrives all the same. Fun isn’t something one considers when ushering in a Labour landslide, but it does put a smile on his face. With the next government’s grotesque in-tray, the space for a radical right alternative will only grow larger. Even if he doesn’t become Leader of the Opposition, Farage will remain a focus point for our coming Continental politics.
All in all, rather grim reading for Downing Street this morning. At least Sunak has this evening’s debate to shake things up a little. I shall watch it from behind the sofa.