By-elections 2023: Have the Lib Dems finally scrubbed away the stains of the Clegg years?

Perhaps it’s all the excitement overnight, a lack of sleep, or a combination of the two, but I’ve been thinking. A now-established Liberal revival, the dawn of a long-awaited realignment of the left – and some highly significant lost deposits – make this a moment to celebrate for British progressives.

Without very much encouragement from their respective party leaderships, Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters are deciding that the most important thing they can do with their vote is to cast it for the party best placed to get the Tories out. And they have been doing so in numbers that should make the Tories wince. There is no Lib-Lab electoral pact, because it isn’t required. The two parties will continue to campaign accordingly and strategically.

Take Somerton and Frome. The doubling in the Liberal Democrat share of the vote handed them a historic victory, redolent of some of their most famous historic past shock results such as in Orpington and Christchurch.

You can see how an unpopular Tory government, coupled with a party at last emerging from the long shadow of the Cameron-Clegg era, was at some point going to result in (another) Liberal revival where Labour has been traditionally weak, in much of the West Country.

Hence the spectacular victory in Somerton, which was held by the Lib Dems between 1997 and 2015, before succumbing to the wipe-out in the post-coalition general election. By that time the voters weren’t interested in what the Lib Dems had to say, and the Tories recaptured the south west.

Now things are different, and it is partly thanks to Labour voters. Their switching “sides” means a Tory party parliamentary candidate can no longer assume that the opposition vote will be conveniently split.

In Somerton, the Labour share of vote collapsed from 12.9 per cent to just 2.6 per cent (more than the turnout fell), completely against the national swing. The Labour candidate lost their deposit, and finished in fifth place. Fine. The reward was helping to humiliate the Conservatives and push them out of power.

This is the same pattern as we’ve seen in the other Lib Dem mega-upsets in this parliament – Chesham and Amersham, North Shropshire, and Tiverton & Honiton – where Labour supporters desperate to get the Tories out surged towards the Lib Dems. In turn, Lib Dems switched in substantial numbers to Labour in Uxbridge, and before that notably in by-elections in Bexley, Wakefield and Stretford. It’s an established pattern – and one that should terrify almost any Tory candidate.

So, what happens next? With now four sensational by-election gains, the Lib Dems can claim that they’re back, and ready to recover further lost ground. Memories of the coalition are fading. It’s now a decade since Nick Clegg and his colleagues betrayed their solemn, literally signed pledge on tuition fees, and were hit by a backlash that is only now really subsiding.

In case you had forgotten, as U-turns go it puts most such moves well in the shade. At the 2010 general election the Lib Dems promised to abolish tuition fees, a move that led to the short-lived phenomenon of “Cleggmania”. Then, under the persuasion of George Osborne, they agreed to triple them instead, in return for jobs in government. It felt cynical.

The original policy might have been a populist mistake, but the damage caused by ditching it was long-lasting. Even the party’s enthusiasm to win a second EU referendum didn’t lift them properly out of oblivion. When Jo Swinson (remember her?) repeated Clegg’s earlier hubris in agreeing to give Boris Johnson his early general election in 2019, the party got squashed again. There was no Remain-dulled breakthrough. Swinson lost her seat. Clegg and Swinson’s strategic blunders in 2010 and 2019 bookended a miserable decade for the party.

But now that Brexit and the Tories have proved such a flop the Lib Dems are extremely well-placed to recover much more of the ground lost after 2010. Wisely, they have made it abundantly clear that there won’t be another Lib-Con coalition, and people now believe them. Nor is anyone scared of Ed Davey propping up a Keir Starmer minority government, if it came to it, in contrast to a Jeremy Corbyn administration.

Slowly rebuilding their traditional local government base and focusing on key marginals and by-elections, the Lib Dems now menace the Tories in about 30 seats where they need a swing of 10 per cent or so to win. Aside from East Dunbartonshire, Sheffield Hallam and Cambridge, all their targets are Tory-held. Many are names that are familiar, having been part of one or more past Liberal revivals – Cheltenham, Winchester, Cheadle, Hazel Grove, Harrogate, Brecon and Radnorshire, North Devon. Even Surrey South West, Jeremy Hunt’s seat, is under threat. Quite a scalp. They should punch above their weight in the polls, stuck on about 10 per cent.

No one claims that Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey is a fireball. He lacks the barnstorming campaigning style of some of his illustrious predecessors. Then again, the word “charisma” is also seldom attached to fellow knight Sir Keir Stamer or Rishi “head boy” Sunak.

After an era dominated by the boosterish Johnson and the radical Jeremy Corbyn, our politicians feel more mundane, all three main leaders are now clever and rational technocrats. As it happens, that suits the present subdued mood of the nation well. We’ve had enough of the troublemakers and the showmen, which is just as well for Davey.

What does the future hold? With 30 or 40 seats they should overtake the troubled SNP in Commons representation, and with restored third-party parliamentary status the party’s profile at PMQs, parliamentary committees and in the broadcast media will be boosted considerably.

A social democratically-inclined Labour government led by Starmer should be able to work with the Liberal Democrats acting in a spirit of “constructive opposition”, especially on constitutional matters and cleaning up politics. They would, in other words, pick up the threads of where Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair left off a quarter century ago.

At that time Davey was a brilliant economics researcher for the party, and I spent a brief spell in Ashdown’s press team, so he will well recall that there was much talk then of a progressive realignment on the centre left, sometimes called “The Project”. Ashdown and Blair even sat on a cross-party cabinet committee on the constitution (principally devolution), in an atmosphere of ever-closer cooperation. Nothing came of it, because Charles Kennedy had a sensibly cautious view of getting too close to Blair; but bitter history proves that a centrist Labour Party is a far more compatible partner for the Lib Dems than the Tories.

There’s no harm in dreaming about how British politics could undergo some kind of realignment on the centre-left in the coming decade – it was the inspirational vision espoused so eloquently by Jo Grimond, Roy Jenkins, Ashdown and others over the decades. It represents a historic mission to repair the historic schism on the left, between Liberals and Labour, in the 20th century, which gifted the governance of the UK to the Conservatives for most of the time since the Great War.

Time to rethink the left once again then, because although the Tories will be vanquished next time and may even split, one day they too will be back. One can see how such a revised project of loose Lib-Lab cooperation could revolve around Europe, social justice, economic efficiency and the environment.

Both parties would protect their identity and appeal – indeed that is essential to continued electoral health – and there is no need for counter-productive electoral pacts when the voters do it for you. A merger would be a terrible mistake, but there’s every reason to work together – and the voters might like it.

As I say, having been up most of the night, and witnessed two triumphs and one disappointment, I may be hallucinating, but it’s highly tempting to think that things can only get better for Britain’s centre left. This time, it’s the people leading the way.