Before Rishi Sunak had even started speaking from the Downing Street podium on Wednesday, Sir Ed Davey was making his way south to Surrey Heath.
Twenty-four hours after delivering his first stump speech of the election from a leafy park in Michael Gove’s constituency, the Liberal Democrat leader formally launched his campaign in Cheltenham, where Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, is clinging on with a wafer-thin majority of just 981.
Davey’s third and fourth stops were Eastbourne and Lewes, both now Tory but Lib Dem within very recent memory. On Saturday he went to Chichester, education secretary Gillian Keegan’s seat.
• General election poll tracker: who will win the vote?
As Davey repeated his lines — rebuild the NHS, support pensioners in comfortable retirement, clean up England’s sewage-infested rivers — the outlines of the Lib Dem strategy were already clear.
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An orange wave is heading for the Tory “blue wall”, where a Lib Dem revival, and the future of a string of Conservative cabinet ministers — although not that of Gove, who announced on Friday he is standing down — will be decided over the next six weeks.
While the Lib Dems are standing everywhere, they have, since 2019, channelled their resources into 90 constituencies where the party is currently second to the Tories. These are now Davey’s target seats, where he will spend the most time campaigning – and where the Lib Dems believe tactical Labour supporters will prove vital in helping them oust the Tories.
They are mainly located in the blue wall, the loose collection of Tory seats in southern England filled with economically conservative, socially liberal voters. They include the seats held by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt (Godalming & Ash); the leader of the Commons, Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North); and the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire).
They are firmly in Davey’s sights, as are Stratford-on-Avon, Hazel Grove and Harrogate, which are further afield but demographically similar.
Four by-election gains since 2019 and the gradual depletion of Tory councillors in recent local elections, have added to the Lib Dems’ belief that the blue wall could crumble.
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Experts believe that come July 4, they could claim as many as 40 seats — returning the party to its former place as Britain’s third largest. The Lib Dems are most confident of toppling Hunt, Chalk and Keegan, although their resurgence in Cambridgeshire and Surrey means even Frazer and Gove’s successor are at risk.
Success is likely to stem from tactical voting.
According to research by the think tank More in Common, as many as one in four voters in the blue wall intend to vote tactically.
Among Lib Dem voters nationally, one in three are motivated by the desire to get the Tories out, 5 per cent intend to vote Lib Dem because they like the leader and many more are doing so because of their dislike of both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.
Meanwhile, 16 per cent of Labour voters would be prepared to lend their support to the Lib Dems if they felt their own candidate stood no chance of winning.
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Davey’s strategy is predicated on this: on Wednesday, he claimed that the Lib Dems were “the only party who can beat the Conservatives across the blue wall”.
Internally, the Lib Dems are referring to these voters as “Surrey shufflers” or “squeezers”. They are 25 to 40-year-olds, typically Labour supporters, who have moved from London to the Home Counties since Covid to raise a family. Their priorities are mortgage bills, the NHS and green spaces, largely aligning with those of traditional Lib Dem voters.
There is a second, equally important strand to the Lib Dem campaign, which relies on convincing Tory voters to shift allegiances in dozens of constituencies.
“Wokingham Waitrose woman” is typically female, aged between 40 and 60, and a previously a lifelong Tory voter through familial links or professional background who has become fed-up with the dysfunctional Conservative government and the “trashing” of institutions such as the Church of England, National Trust and BBC. These people also put a large premium on their local environment and are angered by the water companies and the pollution of local rivers and lakes.
The Lib Dems have begun deploying digital ads across key target seats, including Hunt’s, to remind these voters why they have become disillusioned with Sunak’s party. One flicks from Johnson (“partied through a pandemic”) to Truss (“crashed the economy”) and ends with a picture of Sunak, captioned: “Record NHS wait times.”
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Much has been made of an informal Lib Dem-Labour pact not to compete aggressively in the other’s key target seats, but there is mixed evidence on whether this will happen. Labour appeared to give the Lib Dems a clear run to take North Shropshire from the Tories in the 2021 by-election, with the Lib Dems putting up a minimal fight in Old Bexley & Sidcup. But in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election in the autumn, things became so heated Labour threatened to report Davey’s party to the police over “smear tactics”.
In this election, the problem Davey faces is that Labour, which is consistently scoring over 40 points in the polls, could stand to benefit the most from tactical voting.
According to Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, a sixth of Lib Dem supporters intend to cast their ballots for another party, while four in ten say they would switch allegiances if they discover the party cannot win in their seat. This, Tryl says, will mostly benefit Starmer.
Starmer’s decision to fight a presidential-style election is likely to benefit him in the blue wall, where he is more popular than Davey, though his party’s brand trails the Lib Dems. And while the Lib Dems made significant gains in the local elections, in the southeast of England Labour has, over the past two decades, eroded its council representation in areas such as Adur, Worthing and Hastings.
Retention has also been a problem. While Labour has kept 85 per cent of its voters from 2019, the Lib Dems appear to have held on to just 52 per cent, only marginally better than the Tories on 53 per cent.
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Historically, the Lib Dems have benefited from a last-minute surge in their poll numbers, which tend to rise by about five points in the three months before polling day. But this has not happened since 2010, when Nick Clegg became the unlikely star of the campaign after shining in the television debates.
“Our research finds the Lib Dems face something of a paradox,” Tryl adds. “On the one hand the Tories’ collapse in southern blue wall seats could open the possibility of significant gain. There’s also no doubt they stand to benefit from tactical voting.
“But at the same time they are currently underperforming against Labour. Their challenge is using the six-week campaign to convince left-leaning voters in southern seats that only they can defeat the Tories — do that and they could well be heading to 40 seats; fail to do so and it will be a disappointing night for the Liberal Democrats.”
