Can the success of the Lib Dems force the Tories back to the centre?

Keir Starmer’s triumph overshadowed another remarkable result of the general election: the huge success of Ed Davey. If Labour defied precedent to double its number of seats, what are we to make of the Liberal Democrats who increased their representation ninefold?

The Lib Dems won 11 seats in the previous election, and even Jo Swinson, their leader, lost her seat. On the new boundaries, the Lib Dems would have had just eight seats in 2019. Now they have 72. That is the highest number since 1923, when their predecessor Liberal Party won 158 seats and was overtaken for the second and decisive time by the rising Labour Party.

This is almost as profound a change in the landscape, although it has been obscured by Labour’s domination.

So far, however, all it has produced is some rather petty whingeing from Lib Dems about how they should be granted more status in parliament, given that their party is more than half the size of the Conservative one. The Lib Dems have displaced the Scottish National Party as the third-largest party in the Commons, which gives Davey the right to two questions at Prime Minister’s Questions. But because there are 72 Lib Dem MPs to 121 Tories, they say that instead of Rishi Sunak getting six questions and Davey two, a fairer allocation would be five and three.

But the existence of such a large block of Lib Dem MPs, squatting like a moderating toad across much of what used to be Tory England, is much more significant than that.

For one thing, it will have a big effect on the internal politics of the Lib Dems themselves. With 72 MPs, they have the chance to form actual factions rather than personal alliances. There are bound to be tensions over the party’s attitude to the Labour government: will it attack Starmer from the right or the left? Already the party has gone to the left on lifting the two-child limit on universal credit, and on suspending arms sales to Israel, but there are battles ahead on house building and tax.

Much as everyone is enjoying the discomfort of Adrian Ramsay, co-leader of the Greens, as he objects to pylons in his back yard of Waveney Valley on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, the Lib Dems are more prolific hypocrites, opposing development locally while favouring it nationally. It is how they won the Chesham and Amersham by-election in 2021, after all – a seat they retained on 4 July.

And it will be interesting to see how the new Lib Dem constituencies in the Tory-minded home counties – including Chesham and Amersham – will take to Rachel Reeves raising taxes on inheritance, pensions, capital gains or big houses.

Not that this will make much difference in the short term. For the moment, Starmer and Reeves are monarchs of all they survey. Starmer enjoys a majority so huge that he can afford to lose seven of his own MPs, suspending John McDonnell and other members of the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group.

One new Labour MP observed to me brightly that Starmer’s non-appointment of Emily Thornberry to ministerial office was like the episode of Friends (“The One with the Girl from Poughkeepsie”) in which Monica hires Joey so she can fire him in front of her kitchen staff to make clear to them that she is the boss. The suspension of McDonnell and his comrades is like running that episode seven more times, just to make sure that other Labour MPs get the message.

But the Labour good times will not last for ever, and as the next election approaches, the gravitational pull of the Lib Dem mass will increasingly be felt.

For one thing, it is Starmer’s insurance policy. A gloomy Labour former staffer pointed out to me that the party’s majority, though it looks vast and lasting, is vulnerable to a mere 4 per cent swing to the Tories next time. This is a version of the “sandcastle” theory – that great electoral victories, even if they give rise to grand theories of permanent realignments, are transient things.

A 4 per cent swing isn’t much – certainly compared with the record-breaking 11 per cent swing to Labour between 2019 and 2024. But if the Labour government loses support at the next election, it will have the buffer of the Lib Dems to give it a soft landing. The Lib Dems may not want to go into coalition after what happened to them last time, and they may distance themselves from Starmer, but they will still be more inclined to prop up a Labour government than a Tory one. Those 72 seats, mostly taken from the Tories, are likely to provide a fire break against a Tory government for some time to come.

That is related to the second significance of the Lib Dem success: it will force the Tories back to the centre ground. There is no way the Tories can win again except by winning back most of the seats they lost to the Lib Dems on 4 July.

As Tom Tugendhat, the leadership candidate, tried to explain in his pitch to fellow Tories, winning back people who voted for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK will not be enough. Each Reform voter won back will add to the Tory vote, but a voter won back from the Lib Dems or Labour will “count double”, because as well as adding to the Tory vote they will subtract from the votes for a Lib Dem or Labour MP.

I am not sure the Tory party is ready to hear that message. Perhaps it will become clearer by the time of the next election. Because if the Tory party ignores it, it could face the prospect of 1923 all over again – only this time it could be the Tory party that is overtaken by the Lib Dems and condemned to decades of irrelevance.