A feeling of disappointment the Friday morning after a general election is hardly a new experience for Liberal Democrats, but the party does at least manage to keep things interesting for its members by making the failure seem a bit different each time. There was the 2015 collapse, of course, then the inability to make much headway in 2017. The 2010 election saw the party gain votes but lose seats. Even 2005 was seen as a bit of a letdown, given the importance of the Iraq war as an issue.
But even among that sorry list 2019 feels especially brutal. The party had a sense of momentum after a series of defections and good European and local election results, there was a distinctive position on the major issue of the day, and Lib Dems even had a bit of a swagger in their step after seeing off the challenge of Change UK earlier in the year.
All that hope started ebbing way during this election campaign as the party found itself squeezed out of the picture, with any voters who were terrified of Boris Johnson simply going back to Labour. There will now be plenty of snap judgments made about the party’s revoke stance and decision to push for an early election – many of them by people who were strangely silent or even supportive when those decisions were made. At some point the treatment of Jo Swinson will be part of an interesting study of how young women in politics in all parties are perceived. But the bigger issue is, “what do we do now?”
For several years, Brexit and the political upheaval surrounding it have been a lifeboat for the Lib Dems. When everything else looked overwhelming they had a relatively united stance that helped them stand out. And in a parliament where every vote counted, their small number of MPs was not the disadvantage it could have been. In the new landscape all that has changed.
Fortunately, the party is resilient and members who made it through coalition and its aftermath are made of strong stuff. There is the opportunity to get back to building a distinctive policy platform that sometimes felt like it had been pushed into the background over the last few years. Plus Brexit isn’t going anywhere as an issue for a while yet.
But all that is just what helps keep the party bumping along and surviving. If the Lib Dems want to achieve more than just that it needs something else.
As another former Liberal Democrat adviser, Phil Reilly, pointed out this morning, there may be hope in looking at one of the few elections that Lib Dems regard with some warmth: 1997. In that election the party was unashamedly a party of the centre-left that had more in common with Labour than it did the Conservatives. There are many reasons why that vanished, not least the Lib Dems going into coalition and Labour’s journey away from the centre, but a healthy Tory majority is about to remind us all why we felt we had much more in common back then.
It is an absurdity that the last two general elections have seen voters wanting a centre-left option left feeling they had no plausible candidate to be prime minister. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with pre-Corbyn Labour advisers and MPs that have left me wondering why on earth we are unable to find some way of cooperating or at least getting out of each other’s way. We can all spend the next few years shaking our heads or we can actually work out what can be done.
Labour has its own journey to make in all of this, but the Liberal Democrats can at least do their bit. We can be more than just the anti-Brexit party and we can find ways to work with MPs from other parties to take on a Conservative party that will now feel, understandably, that it has the power to do anything it wants.
There are two great pities in all of this. The first is that Swinson, a politician who always believed in the value of cooperation across party lines, is not going to be in parliament at just the time when someone with that view of politics is needed the most. The second is that in the runup to the election and during the campaign the party often gave the impression that it was more open to dealing with Tories, or former Tories, than it was with Labour, at the same time as Labour seemed more prepared to ask Lib Dems to stand down in certain seats than it was to offer to step aside elsewhere in return.
But the Lib Dems have always prided themselves on being rational and open – principles that are desperately needed now. We should be ready to cooperate with anyone who shares those values.
• Sean Kemp is a former head of media for the Liberal Democrats and was a special adviser in Downing Street during the coalition government
