What is the point of the Lib Dems?

Andy Burnham may provide the answer

Q: What’s worse than calling your teacher ‘mum’?

A: Accidentally hugging Shirley Williams because she so reminds you of your grandma.

Now, to be clear, it never actually came to this. But, born months apart, of similar height, gait and hairstyle, it wouldn’t have been a totally preposterous mistake to make either. For that reason, whenever I saw Baroness Williams on the Parliamentary Estate, it always took a moment for my brain to compute that this was a working peer and not someone who’d arrived, salami sandwiches in tow, to pick me up from primary school.

Williams, a cabinet minister in the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments, is perhaps best known for constituting one-quarter of the Gang of Four which, dismayed at Labour’s leftward drift, broke away in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Spoiler alert — the party failed in its ambition to ‘break the mould’ of British politics. For what it’s worth, my view is that David Owen, like Michael Portillo a generation later, was simply too leading man handsome to become prime minister. The SDP subsequently merged with wee David Steel’s Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats.

By the way, it would be remiss of me not to share this image of a young Daniel Finkelstein at the Portsmouth conference during which the merger was debated.¹

(YouTube Screenshot)

Of course, around the same time, Labour was partway through its long march to the centre ground, first under Neil Kinnock and John Smith and finally by Tony Blair.² As Labour continued to govern in the centre and as the Iraq War began to cost the party support among Left and Muslim voters, the Lib Dems under Charles Kennedy emerged as a left-wing alternative. Then under Nick Clegg, the party was once again to Labour’s Right, not least by forming the coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010.

I suppose this potted history of Labour-Liberal relations is circling the drain while I rouse the courage to ask: why didn’t Williams ever rejoin the Labour Party? Which is a more polite way of asking the question Finkelstein himself often muses: what is the point of the Liberal Democrats?

That nice Ed Davey fellow

Having led his party to its best ever result at the 2024 general election, better, in fact, than any Liberal performance in over a century, Sir Ed Davey has endured a campaign of Birkenstock-wearing whispers. He’s too cautious, too gradualist, lacking a compelling vision for the country.

These are all, to some extent, fair critiques. Why is it that, at a time of historic Labour unpopularity and a rising illiberalism on the far left and right of politics, the Lib Dems are practically missing in action? Partly, this is the trouble with leading any small party in Britain, particularly one that generally avoids eye-catching policies such as deporting legal migrants or defining Jewish self-determination as racism.

For the Lib Dems specifically, the reality is that its political position often matters less than Labour’s. If the latter drifts to the Left, it creates room for the Lib Dems to split the difference between them and the Tories. When Labour moves to the centre, the Lib Dems must decide whether to accept the swap or fight it out. And there’s a further complicating factor.

As the Financial Times’ Stephen Bush is fond of noting, the real leader of the Lib Dems is in actual fact the Labour leader. Because voters who might, in a perfect world, be predisposed to voting for the Lib Dems may not be prepared to do so if they find Labour leader scary. This, in addition to its Brexit position, explains why the party did so badly in 2017 and 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader.

Here comes Andy