Adventures in the dark heart of Lib Dem-land

‘Compare us with every other party in the House of Commons today and we’re easily the most united, with the biggest smile on our face’, Ed Davey informed the Financial Times in January. Well, Ed Davey has always been more of a clown than a contender, even if he is favoured by the provincial middle-class demographic that dominates the party’s membership. Restore UK MP Rupert Lowe spoke for those of us outside this bubble when posting his opinion of Davey on X: ‘You are a low-IQ gnome whose talents would be better suited to fishing bits of bird shit out a garden pond.’

This jibe was a response to one of Davey’s many attacks on Elon Musk – ‘He must be held to account for what he is: a purveyor of child pornography’, said Davey in January. But it could have been a response to any one of the Lib Dem leader’s desperate grabs for attention. Just this week, he was calling for the cancellation of King Charles’s trip stateside in July, to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. He claimed the king’s presence would be a ‘diplomatic coup for President Trump… someone who repeatedly insults and damages our country’.

Like Musk, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has become a regular target of Davey’s posturing and tweeting, all of which is as embarrassing as the stunts he embarks on to highlight local concerns. He slid down a waterslide to promote children’s mental-health services. He drummed on an exercise ball to highlight social care. He bungee jumped to encourage voters to support his party at the 2024 General Election, and rode a roller coaster at Thorpe Park to launch its manifesto. Throughout this, Ed Davey wears what Quentin Crisp, when describing the face he settled on to face the world, called a look of ‘fatuous affability’. You could state the number of victims of largely Pakistani grooming gangs, or reveal that ABBA had reformed, and Davey’s expression would remain the same.

Actually, the second of these is the safe topic more likely to begin a discussion among the party faithful. If the Lib Dem leader dared to draw attention to the systematic rape of white working-class girls, it would doubtless be via a flume ride at Center Parcs. That’s not to imply that he is not a moral man. Davey sees himself as a saviour with a mission, fully aware of his priorities. In 2025, he said he had a ‘moral duty’ to ensure that Nigel Farage does not become British prime minister.

The largest concentration of support for the Liberal Democrats is in the West Country, where a battle royal with Reform UK is expected to commence at the next General Election. I have some skin in the game, as someone who moved from my native London to this territory a decade ago. I found decent, generous people, who fed and watered me during cocktail hour, among Lib Dem supporters. Politics was avoided like bad etiquette, until Brexit, Donald Trump, the pink ladies’ protests, and marches against grooming gangs and mass immigration arose amid the chit-chat and clinking glass. Then things got ugly. When it came to politics, these people were not the people I thought they were, but they were the people I feared they might be. As they are quick to condemn and caricature those without the luxury beliefs permitted within the echo chamber in which they exist, permeated by those of a similar class, status and pedigree (I’m the exception to the rule), I feel no hesitation in sharing my field notes on those loyal to Lib Dem land.

The provincialism of the middle-class Lib Dem loyalist is not attributable to place, but outlook. These are people convinced they are multicultural and cosmopolitan, while limiting themselves to a parochial social circle. They are conventional people who labour under the delusion they are rebellious. They embrace their status while simultaneously denying it, so as to appear empathetic, sometimes casting themselves as the privileged poor. They support the Lib Dems because the Tories are too crass, Reform is too common and Labour is too costly.

I’ve witnessed an elderly Lib Dem devotee, who lives in a house large enough to warrant a tour guide, declare that he and his wife would not be able to eat if they didn’t sell up within two years. He also owned rental homes and bought his children homes to rent to others, with inherited family money. A lady who lunches, who admitted to a crush on former party leader Nick Clegg, revealed tearfully: ‘I felt physical pain when the Brexit result came through, because my children wouldn’t be able to travel through Europe as I had.’ Her children were at the local private school, even though she disapproved of private education. ‘They would not have survived at state school.’ After attending university, and enjoying a stint in London, their children return to this territory as adults, to become parents, to become the next generation of Liberal Democrat supporters.

In recent months, the party unity that brought a smile to the Lib Dem leader’s face has begun to fragment. There are rumours of dissent in the ranks due to Davey’s failure to capitalise on the anger the electorate harbours for the Labour government. This ‘frustration’ was confirmed when Politics UK quoted one disenchanted MP: ‘Reform [is] assuming a place in the national debate, and so are the Greens. We are content to not do this. And it isn’t good enough.’ Anticipating that this unrest could fester, Davey took himself away from Thorpe Park and Alton Towers to present himself as a political player on the world stage. Yet the statements he issues to give himself gravitas, consisting in the main of anti-Trump posturing, are as empty as the stunts and pratfalls at theme parks – and, ultimately, have as little impact.

Last year, Davey announced he would be boycotting a state banquet for President Trump, as a stand against his response to the crisis in Gaza. Tapping into the student slogans then (and still) doing the rounds, Davey declared that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his government were responsible for ‘genocide’. Playing to the same raggedy crowd, he demanded the recognition of a Palestinian state.

Presently, Elon Musk is as much of a folk devil as Trump for the likes of Davey. He accused the X owner of meddling in democracy and inciting far-right violence during the Unite the Kingdom march – an event that angered Davey and his tribe as much as the Brexit vote. Playing David to Musk’s Goliath, he suggests ‘Tesla tariffs’ to hit him where it hurts, and prosecuting him under the Online Safety Act for allowing material that shows child abuse and self-harm on X. This from the leader who advised his party to abstain in a parliamentary vote on a national inquiry into the rape gangs and the efforts to cover up their crimes.

When it comes to issues such as Brexit, Davey’s reaction is extreme. He proposes building bridges with the EU that would eliminate the result. Yet his party claims to be the ‘moderate’ voice absent in British politics. Supposedly, the Lib Dems are the ‘progressive’ response to the ‘populism’ of Nigel Farage and Reform UK, which he believes adheres to Trumpian politics and an American-style ‘right wing’ fervour, compared with the ‘British values’ and ‘patriotism’ the Lib Dems represent. This is clearly a recent development, given his party previously talked of ‘patriotism’ much as Labour MPs and student activists did – that is, as synonymous with ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’. The pratfalls of Davey pale into insignificance when compared with former leader Tim Farron draping himself in the Union Jack at the party’s autumn 2025 conference in Bournemouth – an event as white as Glastonbury, so white in fact it might alarm Jon Snow. The Lib Dem supporters and MPs indulging in this tragic spectacle, like those at the Labour Party conference attempting something similar with the various flags of the United Kingdom, had everyone else cringing at the comic desperation of it.

Davey and the current crop of Lib Dem MPs are neither genuinely progressive people nor serious politicians, but they emerged from parties that included figures that were. The high watermark of the Liberal Party in the 20th century was the years in government, 1906 to 1915, during which the ‘New Liberalism’ introduced the welfare reforms that successive Labour governments built on. The Liberals’ fortunes changed with their merger with the Social Democratic Party in 1988, the party founded seven years prior by the Gang of Four. These were the veteran Labour MPs who left the party as it began to prioritise the left-wing fringe issues that would eventually define its ideology – a process that would ultimately alienate working-class supporters and transform it into the party of the middle class that it is today.

During the period the Lib Dems found themselves in government, between 2010 and 2015, in an unholy alliance with the Conservatives, they were criticised by their own side at the time for reneging on abolishing student tuition fees. In the years since, it’s the negligence of Ed Davey as minister for postal affairs during the Post Office and Horizon IT scandal that has drawn criticism from elsewhere. When the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office returned the story to the headlines in January 2024, Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson posted on X:

‘Ed Davey was paid £833 an hour – over £220,000 in total – to advise lawyers who were acting for the Post Office. (Taking taxpayers’ money to persecute petrified, innocent people.) As postal-affairs minister, Davey refused to believe Alan Bates about Post Office bullying. But happy to jump into the trough after.’

Davey’s knack for jumping on a bandwagon just as it’s leaving town has become evident since he took the helm of the party. He replaced Jo Swinson, the first female leader of the Liberal Democrats, who defeated him in the previous leadership challenge. Swinson put a smile on all our faces when her image appeared on the promotional leaflets during the 2019 campaign, arriving through the letterbox among the pizza flyers, with the declaration that we were looking at ‘Britain’s next prime minister’.

The brash declarations Davey now peddles are as performative as the indignation his fellow MPs express when rising to their feet in the House of Commons. This is notable among the party’s female MPs. Last October, deputy leader Daisy Cooper aired her indignation, and shared her limited insight, on a subject outside the echo chamber in which Liberal Democrat MPs exist: Tommy Robinson. She demanded the current prime minister direct the security services to evaluate the threat that Elon Musk ‘poses to our democracy’ for giving Robinson legal support (he had just been charged under the Terrorism Act in 2024 for refusing to give police his phone password, and was subsequently acquitted). In April 2025, the diminutive West Country Lib Dem MP, Tessa Munt, made similar demands, shrinking behind huge dark glasses – she’s sensitive to the harsh lights in the chamber – that would have dwarfed Anna Wintour.

Munt lives in Wedmore and represents Wells. In the country at weekends, at a Saturday surgery, or at hedgehog farms that feature on Facebook posts, she sports an archaic Sloane Ranger look of cashmere crew neck, a polo shirt with the collar raised, jeans, Chelsea boots and pearls. Munt, rightfully and nobly, supports local farmers and addresses their current grievances, but doesn’t extend this to the victims of grooming gangs. This was evident in her contribution to a cross-party Commons debate, in response to a contribution from Conservative MP Katie Lam.

Opening a moving, heartfelt speech, Lam addressed the need for an inquiry into the rape gangs, highlighting the racial and religious aspects that contributed to these crimes. She said: ‘One of the victims from Dewsbury was told by her rapist: “We’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government.”’ Lam spoke graphically about the violence the victims had suffered, informing the few figures present in the commons, the language was necessary because ‘We must not look away or sanitise this evil’.

She quoted the sentencing remarks of judge Peter Rook, who gave Mohammed Karrar of Oxford life in prison:

‘You prepared her [his victim, a 13-year-old girl] for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to gang rape by five or six men. At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet… When she was 12, after raping her, she threatened you with your lock knife. Your reaction was to pick up a baseball bat with a silver metal handle, strike her on the head with it, and then insert the baseball bat inside her vagina.’

Lam concluded:

‘This is not about me, the minister, the home secretary or any honourable members in the chamber; it is about the little girls, up and down our country, whose brutal and repeated rapes were permitted and hidden by those in the British state whose jobs were to protect them.’

Responding to Lam, Munt made the issue about herself, and sanitised this evil in the process. ‘My blood is boiling as I listen to the stuff coming from Conservative members’, she said, playing to the gallery. ‘If they had read the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, they would recognise that there are hundreds of thousands of people alive today – people just like me, white girls – who suffered at the hands of white men who have got clean away with it, because nothing was done for so long.’ As Madeline Grant wrote in her Telegraph column at the time: ‘Belittling the unspeakable abuse of thousands of girls as “stuff” is bad enough; even worse to do so from the comfort of places where the realities of “community tension” are scarcely felt.’

In essence, here is the sinister undertow that lies beneath the ‘moderate’ veneer of the Liberal Democrats. The contempt they harbour for those outside their bubble, with a different experience and a different outlook, who now support Reform, is no different to that expressed by hysterical protesters with blue hair and placards, putting their weight behind Your Party or the Greens. The difference being the provincial middle-class Lib Dem devotees come with hand-knitted scarves, Hunter wellies, Barbour jackets, Amnesty tote bags, and pearls. They carry their Fitzcarraldo Editions to coffee shops for effect, but read Cormoran Strike novels in book groups. They would rather defend the BBC than defund it. They listen to The Last Dinner Party.

The UK political party these people loyally support is not currently a real threat, but it could become one. And Ed Davey could still be leading the Liberal Democrats and in the running, garnering support from disgruntled Labour moderates and Tory wets. At which point the smile on that fatuous face will widen. To the rest of us, Davey will still be the joke he’s always been. But the joke won’t be funny anymore.

Michael Collins is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class. His Substack is at anothermichaelcollins.com.