The Lib Dem manifesto is sensible – but it won’t save Jo Swinson from her failing campaign

If all had gone according to Jo Swinson’s brightest hopes, by now she and her party would be storming towards 30 per cent support in the opinion polls, attracting large swathes of “moderate” Remain voters from both main parties, and the nation would be in the grip of “Jo-mania”, “Swinson fever”, or some such.

That, after all, is one reason why an early general election made some sense for the Liberal Democrats, or at least as it seemed to Ms Swinson. Yet now it seems a misjudgement. The party is languishing in the polls, her trigger-happy response to using nuclear weapons making her look unfit to serve, and she will be lucky to maintain the 19 seat-strong representation she had in the Commons by the end of the last parliament. She will do better than the hapless Tim Farron, but not by that much. No one has yet bothered to ask her if gay sex is a sin.

Ms Swinson has been a minister of state (more than Jeremy Corbyn achieved) but a casual observer might never have thought it from her gung-ho ways. The “right” way for a prime ministerial candidate to answer a question on nuclear weapons is to rule out first-use and, reluctantly, not rule out subsequent use – and to evince an air of caution and concern throughout. Ms Swinson sounded more like Dr Strangelove, and a little too keen on loosing off weapons of mass destruction for her target audience’s tastes.

The Lib Dem leader, then, has been the great surprise of the campaign. The Johnson-Corbyn head-to-head debate merely confirmed for most voters that they were, as Ms Swinson so often says, presented with a pair of sub-standard candidates for No 10. Had she been allowed onto the platform, she might have shaken things up and made for a more entertaining hour of viewing – but then again, on her track record thus far, perhaps not.

Whereas her two main male contenders have met mostly low expectations, and Nicola Sturgeon for the SNP is doing even better than anticipated, Ms Swinson seems to be going backwards. Usually the third party makes up ground and gains momentum over a general election campaign; that the reverse is happening now is especially worrying.

Sensible and sane though much of the Liberal Democrat’s manifesto is, it is unlikely to give the party the boost it now desperately needs. It lacks, for example, the sort of totemic, easy to remember pledge that has blessed past campaigns – such as Paddy Ashdown’s pledge to raise income tax by 1p in the pound to fund schools, or Nick Clegg’s to freeze tuition fees (the less said about the aftermath of that the better, though). “Stop Brexit” is a fine slogan, except for three things. First, it sounds extreme – which doesn’t suit a centrist party. Second, it is undemocratic to seek to set aside the 2016 referendum result in that way. Third, and more apposite today, it is failure to win over many of the roughly half the population who still oppose Brexit. Ms Swinson has not managed to scoop that substantial pot, and the failure to do so will probably form part of a difficult post-mortem investigation into the party’s efforts.

The party is fiscally responsible, at a time when such sobriety is out of fashion. Measured plans to increase spending on schools, including teachers’ pay, for example, are balanced with a commitment to run a modest surplus on day-to-day government financing. This prudent approach would limit the growth in the national debt, or even nudge it gradually down, and allow for some room for manoeuvre for a future chancellor to deal with any unexpected crises. It is not, though, a vote winner.

It is still possible that the Liberal Democrats will be able to play a role in a future hung parliament. The “remain Alliance” with the Greens and Plaid Cymru should deliver a few target seats, and the Tories’ hard-line attitude to Brexit will harvest some more in London and the Home Counties. Still, even on the more optimistic scenarios, the Liberal Democrats’ parliamentary force will still be outnumbered by the SNP in the House of Commons, with correspondingly less leverage.

In short, Ms Swinson would do well to stop trying to throw her weight around. It is impertinent for her to demand that Mr Corbyn, the elected leader of another party, stand aside for someone else more to her liking. It is utterly unrealistic, because there would need to be a lengthy election process in the Labour movement. It is unconstitutional, under the terms of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, one of the Lib Dems’ achievements during the coalition government with David Cameron, because he is going to at least be leader of the opposition, with the legal right to try to form an administration.

If stopping Brexit is the most important thing facing the nation, as Ms Swinson consistently argues, and is the issue that transcends all others, then she should take Labour’s promise of a Final Say referendum as the very best offer she is going to get leading a small-ish political party.