Who will win the Liberal Democrats leadership race?

The voting has opened, and the future of what Roy Jenkins used to call the “radical centre” is about to be decided. Who will be the next Lib Dem leader? Acting co-leader and former Coalition cabinet minister the Right Honourable Sir Ed Davey, the bookies’ favourite? Or Layla Moran, the “clean skin” who only entered parliament in 2017, is the education spokesperson and the first (openly) pansexual member of the Commons? If Liberal Democrats were still deciding their leadership under the system that the old Liberal Party once used, with only MPs choosing, then Sir Ed Davey would by now be the person chosen to rebuild their fortunes. Davey has secured the nominations of five of the party’s 11 MPs and, assuming he’d vote for himself, would thus already be safely ensconced as the heir to Gladstone, HH Asquith, David Lloyd George, and Tim Farron.

As it happens Sir Ed also enjoys the majority of nominations among the wider party membership (around 60 per cent, or 1,870 if those who did so, from 330 parties) and a solid backing around the party’s “Establishment”, including Jane Ashdown (widow of Paddy), Lord (Ming) Campbell, and Baroness (Sarah) Ludford. The last two party leaders, Jo Swinson (who lost her own seat last year and prompted the leadership contest), and Sir Vince Cable are keeping schtum about their preferences, and no one mentions Sir Nick Clegg these days, maybe not even visiting his Facebook page.

But though the odds are on Ed, the party’s 120,000 or so members are an independent-minded, sometimes cussed bunch capable of springing a surprise, and propelling the 37-year-old Ms Moran into the leadership, as when Chris Huhne (almost) beat Clegg in 2007 (an intriguing “what if”). Moran isn’t as popular at Westminster as Davey, but has a respectable 40 per cent share of the nominations of party members.

Could there be an upset? The two candidates agree on almost everything, at least superficially. Both stress their green credentials, with Moran making the friendlier noises to the Green Party and Davey pushing his achievements as climate change secretary. Both want Britain to be closer to the EU (though re-joining, and on what terms, iscan olen, not to say unlikely issue). Both want to invest in infrastructure. Both stress traditional liberal values of democracy, participation, human rights and the fight against poverty. Both favour a universal basic income. Both say they won’t go into coalition again with the Conservatives, though Davey has his history of five years serving under David Cameron to live down. His spin is that he spent the time “fighting the Conservatives in government”, stopping them calling an EU referendum and trebling renewable energy; Moran can argue she wasn’t at the scene of the crime. Moran appears the more woke, if only because of the generational difference (Davey is nearly 20 years older). Davey is the more experienced, obviously, and recently enticed Boris Johnson to pledge an inquiry into the Covid crisis. Moran is an enterprising generator of publicity, most recently the scandal of disproportionately high rates of exclusion for black schoolchildren.

If it’s still appropriate to speak in such terms, Davey probably means to the right in the traditional small-state Liberal sense, and was a contributor to The Orange Book (2004), the holy scripture of Lib Dem revisionism and the first, if unknowing, step to the 2010 Cameron-Clegg government, which achieved a great deal but is today friendless. Moran is one of nature’s iconoclasts, which may or may not make it more likely she could tippey-toe into some sort of grassroots-based progressive alliance with Labour and others. She might find herself badly caught up in Britain’s never-ending culture wars, and possibly too keen on identity politics for the task of winning over the average disgruntled Tory, the Lib Dems’ staple diet. Davey is the less challenging option for a protest voter.

In the end, it may simply come down to personalities, as the members assess the two candidates through a series of virtual hustings until the poll closes on 26 August. That may not be quite enough time for Moran to build the momentum she needs to overhaul Davey, but she may well do better than expected, and we can expect to see more of her.

It is intensely unfair, but the party has had four leaders in a decade, three “disappointing” elections and languishes in virtual irrelevance. It should wonder if, like Labour with Starmer and the Tories with Johnson, it too wants Davey, a stale male in his mid-fifties at the head of things. Moran is surely the more likely to grab attention and to raise the party’s profile – but thus also the riskier option. Lib Dem members may themselves, as she hints, wonder what they have to lose when they’re on just 6 per cent in the polls. Then again, the activists know too Moran is the more likely to say something outre, and has faced scrutiny about the time she spent in a police cell after hitting her then boyfriend in a row at party conference about a computer cable. Moran has made it clear that she acted in self-defence; all charges against her were dropped.

Moran and Davey have many gifts, plenty of ideas and much energy. There is much to be said for a distinctive third voice in British politics. The Lib Dems never quite lie down and conveniently expire; they are more like Japanese knotweed, merely lying dormant when everyone assumes the troublesome presence has been extirpated. They’ll be back.

On Europe, on investing in education, on devolution and in the environment past leaders have made an impact. You can punch through. All true. Yet the leader who took the party to its largest Commons presence since the 1920s wasn’t the hyperactive Ashdown or Clegg and the brief period of national Cleggmania he induced, but the legendarily laid-back Charlie Kennedy – 62 MPs in the election of 2005, with some notable bridgeheads into Labour areas. Chatshow Charlie did that by doing little other than shrewdly positioning himself, watching, waiting and capitalising on the unpopularity of Tony Blair’s government (post-Iraq) and the still extreme and divided Tories. The bad news for the Lib Dems is that neither of the main parties is in that much trouble yet. The good news is that there’s plenty of time for that to change, whoever grasps this tarnished chalice.