Davey, one might conclude, had joined illustrious company, becoming an heir to the venerable tradition of Lloyd George and the young Churchill. Yet few would associate the weighty hand of history with today’s MP for Kingston and Surbiton. Remember, Davey’s most noteworthy moment at the last election wasn’t a striking policy proposal or a clippable statement of principle, but his repeated tumbles off a paddle board. Over the weekend, at his party’s spring conference in York, the Lib Dem leader continued his unique brand of guerrilla marketing. Taking to the stage to “Daddy Cool”, the former Secretary of State was later seen “dad dancing” to Chappell Roan. Forget Keynes and Beveridge; even the hinterland and gravitas of Charlie Kennedy now feels as distant as the Edwardians.

More to the point, and given the meteoric rise of both Reform and the Greens, one might ask: why does Davey persist with the slapstick persona? A decade ago the Lib Dems, past masters of the by-election upset, would have fancied their chances in Gorton and Denton. Last month, by contrast, they lost their deposit. It feels, in short, like almost everything in British politics has changed over the past year and a half — except for the Liberal Democrats.

Advocates for Davey’s brand of leadership might reply that whatever one’s views on his style, the results speak for themselves. Beyond his party’s success at the last election, Nowcast and YouGov predict further gains at the next one, the latter putting them on 85 seats.

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But is that really so impressive given that the Lib Dems have long been Westminster’s third party, and that the big two are in freefall? While it’s true that Davey made hay in 2024, cruising home in Tory strongholds like Chichester, Witney, and Guildford, he has not managed to make comparable inroads into Labour territory. Instead, it seems that everyone but the Lib Dems is ready to feed on the carcass of Keir Starmer’s majority, from the Greens and SNP to Reform and Plaid Cymru. Rather than dancing to Gen Alpha bangers, Davey should be asking why Farage and Polanski are making the political weather instead of him.

One explanation is that such ambition is institutionally off-limits. The Lib Dems have learned the hard way — principally from the doomed SDP-Liberal alliance of the 1980s and Clegg’s disappointment in 2010 — that conservative gradualism is better than radical failure. In 2024, Davey delivered on the former, and then some, with a relentless focus on Tory seats in the south of England, especially those that contain a Gail’s bakery. But given the sudden rise of Zack Polanski, who has taken the Greens to more than 200,000 members and a by-election win for the first time in their history, that now feels like a limited strategy.

Perhaps Davey habitually affects a jocular manner because liberalism itself has become an unserious worldview —  so much so that any Lib Dem leader would struggle embody gravitas. Liberalism is bereft of thick ties across society; nor does it offer a deeper sense of meaning to its devotees, something one certainly can’t say for Reform or the Greens. Today’s liberals, in short, believe in little beyond the dying status quo. Their post-Cold War triumph was so utterly overwhelming that, almost two decades after the Global Financial Crisis, they lack the tools to change course.

Adrian Wooldridge, author of Centrists of the World Unite!, provides an insightful explanation of how liberalism conquered all while losing its mojo. As he wrote for UnHerd, liberals “reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation”, yet are “now incapable of running the world which they have made.” It should therefore be little surprise that, over the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have been perennially negative: stop Brexit, stop Corbyn, stop Boris — and now stop Farage. They can’t stand for anything because this is the world they wanted. And it sucks.

That applies to both pillars of what Wooldridge persuasively labels “double liberalism”. Why double? Because it combines the excesses of economic neoliberalism, increasingly pervasive since the early Eighties, with the dismantling of any conception of a shared moral universe, a change that goes back to the 1960s. It is the combination of these two liberalisms that political and media elites have in mind when they talk about the “center” — an increasingly meaningless concept, not least because it is neither the middle ground of public sentiment nor popular. “The strength of the post-liberal argument,” Wooldridge notes, “is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.” What is presented by elites as a politics of moderation often animates resentment and even hatred. The leadership class of the Long Nineties, Tony Blair more than anyone, appears incapable of grasping that.

Yet, left to itself, post-liberalism also gives rise to wantonly self-destructive pathologies. If Davey is incapable of taking himself seriously, then Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage can, on a range of issues, appear outright deranged. How else do you explain the allure of the MAGA-sphere for so much of the British Right? We can ascribe some of the blame to the demise of an ideologically curious liberalism. As a result of this intellectual seppuku, politics on the extremes have become ever more puerile. I say this as a socialist: a historically literate politics of the actual center only serves to refine my own views.

Consider the economy. For all the fanfare around Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE unit, the Brookings Institute recently suggested that America’s fiscal situation is actually deteriorating. In other words, Trump, for all of his radical, disruptive rhetoric, has retained the default platform of the Republican Party since Reagan: deficit-funded tax cuts and rising public debt. As long as the petrodollar exists, that strategy might remain viable for Washington. But it certainly isn’t for the Europeans and Brits, because we don’t benefit from having the world’s reserve currency. That Reform is still barking about a British DOGE — even now — should terrify us all. The enthusiasm underscores the extent to which we are the backwater franchise for a political operation already discredited across the Atlantic. And because liberals at home are ideologically bankrupt too — or, worse still, don’t actually care about ideas — imitation of the Americans still passes for radical, cutting-edge thinking.

It’s a similar story with foreign policy. The radical Right is becoming progressively unmoored from reality over Iran and the wider region, partly because the center has no credible blueprint of its own. At the end of February, Farage was as eager as anyone to become embroiled in yet another overseas conflict, a position he quickly disavowed. The same was true of Badenoch, who initially demanded strikes in the Middle East. Matt Goodwin, who finished second as the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, said he was willing to pay more to fill up his car if that was the cost of depriving Iran of a nuclear weapon. Such opportunism has been exposed only because, on this one occasion, centrists — specifically Keir Starmer — took a position founded on reason rather than complacent liberal interventionism. As a result, and unusually for his time in government, Starmer finds himself aligned with public opinion.

Perhaps a decisive position on the war in Gaza would have achieved something similar — especially had that position been taken earlier on. Yet the Iran response remains instructive. On the one occasion that Labour has broken with the liberal default of recent decades, Labour has Farage on the back foot. It’s strange indeed to see both Richard Tice and Tony Blair knocking a Labour prime minister. This may also be part of a wider pattern, or at least the start of it. Before dancing the Macarena last weekend, Davey argued that the entirety of Britain’s nuclear deterrent should be built at home. It’s important to remember that our Trident missiles are actually from a “shared pool” housed across the Atlantic. Green shoots of pragmatism? Maybe.

Don’t expect a transformation, though. It’s often suggested that contemporary Left-wing politicians aren’t as talented as Tony Benn, and that their Right-wing counterparts are less erudite than Enoch Powell. But why wouldn’t they be, when the ideological school that reigned supreme in recent decades has been so disinterested in ideas? Peter Mandelson is perhaps the most grubby example here, but there’s also Justin Trudeau, who led a country afflicted by a drug epidemic while insisting on the gender-neutral term “peoplekind”, and Kamala Harris — whose presidential bid was a series of meandering speeches and clips of her dancing on social media.

Looking back on his rivals, it is obvious why Trump prevailed not once but twice. While trying to lean into the attention economy, rather than defend politics as a serious vocation, centrists were a handmaid to the very populism they claim to abhor. Trump’s endless, shambling monologues — despite being occasionally funny — were only captivating because what the alternative was a world of clipped soundbites devoid of personality or political substance. Ironically, this also fueled the rise of Barack Obama, whose singular ability to speak capsized the Clinton campaign ahead of 2008. But Obama was the outlier, and Clinton the default for double liberalism. Even then, there was little of substance to what the senator for Illinois actually said.

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All of this helps explain the allure of Mark Carney. The Canadian PM’s recent Davos speech was both brave and intellectually coherent. Notably, Carney acknowledged some of liberalism’s failings over recent decades. But his words were conspicuous precisely because liberalism so rarely produces politicians of substance. For Wooldridge, there is little to read into this shortage of great statesmen. But there’s an argument that it’s structural, emerging from the inherent contradictions of the tradition. Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, claimed it seeks to “dissolve the political into ethics and economics”. Should it really surprise us, then, that given the culmination of the liberal project meant the abolition of politics, competent exponents of the craft would gradually vanish too?

So what might a reanimated liberal politics for the mid-21st century actually look like? First, instinctive complacency would be replaced by an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. In Europe, particularly, we may be in the foothills of our own Century of Humiliation.

On the level of politics, the priorities should be clear: sovereignty is a tool for solving problems — and national identities matter. People want a state that protects them and that stands as a source of authority; if it fails to be either they view it as a useless, wasteful encumbrance. The national community is real. That doesn’t mean forsaking your fellow man in other parts of the world, but it does mean accepting the nation-state as the primary locus of political action.

The policies of a new liberalism should be an extension of such thinking. The wealthy should do their duty to others and their country by accepting the need for a new economic settlement. Wealth is, essentially, collectively produced — and a liberalism that is indifferent to exploitation deserves to die. A renewed liberal politics, retaining its old aim of allowing individuals to be the authors of their own lives, must also ensure that access to the basics is guaranteed: cheap housing, transport, cheap energy. Nobody is reading the collected works of Jane Austen, or learning Mandarin, when they are living in their overdraft.

A great advantage of democracy, of course, is that systems can self-correct. Yet even here there are warning signs. Some centrist commentators have claimed that the Westminster system should become less, rather than more, democratic. Unconvinced by the merits of party primaries, which keep politicians on their toes, they argue for a political class that is even more insulated from the public. It’s ironic that advocates of a worldview built on reason, public deliberation and Enlightenment values often argue for the kind of decadence you might associate with the Hapsburgs or the late Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, however, such voices are becoming quieter. Given the benefits that serious-minded liberalism has brought to all of us — from defending the rule of law to upholding freedom of expression — its reinvigoration, in a form fit for the present day, would be a welcome one. Just don’t expect Ed Davey to lead the charge.

Reform’s emergence as a government-in-waiting has stirred an out-of-sorts patriotism in Britain’s pallid center-left as it attempts to present a vision of Britain and Britishness to compete with Nigel Farage’s insurgent one. “The battle in the next election is between us and Reform,” their leader Ed Davey told the conference. And indeed, the whole event was colored by the idea that there is no more Left and Right, only Liberal and Reform. If “the Nationalists” intended on hoisting flags on A-roads, then the Lib Dems would jolly well get theirs out too.

For four chilly days in the Bournemouth International Center, the Lib Dems spoke of little but the threat the “Nationalists” — that incongruous troop of Reform voters, Tommy Robinson supporters and the occasional stray Tory — posed to “British values”. But they struggled to conjure a positive and distinct vision of Britishness in response.

Instead, in a clownish attempt at middle-class populism, Davey invoked a Britain of “Lionesses”, “cricket pavilions”, and “Male Voice choirs” — a post-twee, reactionary, commuter-belt idyll. And Farage is at the gate. In an attempt to frighten the Lib Dems into action, their leader painted an alternative picture of the country where Reform has the whip hand. Where Reform would roll back gun laws until “schools have to teach our children what to do in case of a mass shooting”. They’ll let Elon Musk expose your kids to porn. They’ll turn your son into Andrew Tate. They’ll denigrate the countryside with fracking and untrammeled development. And, worst of all, they’ll privatize the NHS. “That is Trump’s America,” Davey said. “Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.”

“Reform is the most serious threat liberalism has ever faced, and we have to put all our effort into beating that,” Davey said. Yet the irony is that the Lib Dems need Nigel Farage if they hope to have a shot a power. In shattering the old duopoly, Reform has offered the Lib Dems a route to electoral success: mopping up the Tory moderates and Labour progressives, as both parties stagger in a futile pursuit of the Reform vote. In 2024, the Lib Dems won more seats (72) than any third party since the collapse of the Liberal Party more than a century ago, and in May’s local elections, Lib Dems finished second to Reform. But so far it has failed to articulate an alternative vision for government. The latest poll from More in Common has the Lib Dems in fourth place with a meager 13% of the vote.

Davey has expended much of his mental capacity on Reform’s success. “Here’s the intellectual bit,” he said in a Q&A. “They make people laugh.” And so that is what the Lib Dems must do too. Davey marched through Bournemouth Gardens pursued by a band playing “Sweet Caroline”, he dressed up as a beekeeper, and he had “a blooming good time” planting flowers. And as usual, he didn’t quite pull it off. Farage’s humor isn’t affected in the way that, say, waving a scepter buffoonishly whilst leading a marching band is. Boris Johnson is, perhaps, the model, but he did that all naturally: no one ever wondered why he was acting like a buffoon.

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Davey thinks that “making people smile is the way to win them over”, but the polling disagrees: a majority of voters think his clowning makes the party look unserious and tin-eared. At a time when the electorate has never been so disaffected, when they have a “moral duty” to defeat Reform, and when they’ve never had a better shot at becoming a serious force in British politics, goofing around doesn’t make good policy. It’s just “bullshit”, one MP was reported to have said last week. Besides, it isn’t cutting through. Only a third of Britons can identify Davey’s face, with “Ed Balls” being the most common wrong answer. Those who do know him tend to think he’s just nice. But can “just nice” win an election?

That’s the unavoidable question, especially when it comes to the Lib Dems’ approach to immigration. Not everyone at Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march was a nationalist or racist, Davey said; some just “felt like no one was listening to them”. But are the Lib Dems? Their home affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart seemed flippant at best. She spoke breezily about how migrant hotels are places “where people had their wedding reception… and, of course, [the hotels are] rubbish for the taxpayer”. Elsewhere, for all the Lib Dems’ suggestion that they’d combat Reform with a positive argument for immigration, that petered into some brief mumbling about the economy and the popularity of integration. “There is no harder brief for a liberal [than home affairs],” Smart said, and the Lib Dems seem determined to prove this.

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But the delegates need only look outside the conference center to gauge the problem. Of late, Bournemouth has become one of the most hotly-discussed epicenters of British decline, as photographs of litter-strewn beaches, antisocial behavior, and Muslims praying circulate amongst the online Right. Local hotels have said that bookings are down as a result of this attention, and a volunteer Safeguard Force has been established in response to a perceived increase in crime. “All towns change,” a taxi driver told me wistfully. “It’s more vibrant than it was. Just, well, different.” As the delegates arrived for the conference, 300 locals joined the “Bournemouth Patriots” to protest against the town’s three migrant hotels. And yet, last month, the Lib Dems beat Reform in a local council ward by-election. Surely if the Lib Dems could win here, one overly confident party member reasoned, they could win anywhere.

“We could certainly see a Lib Dem government,” Kamran Hussain, who was canvassing to be the party’s vice-president, told me. “If we keep on spreading our message, moderate people will come to the Lib Dems in droves.” But how? “Operation Leapfrog” is one means to ensure this: they will target Blue-Wall Tory seats, where they finished third in 2024, such as Central Devon, and Fareham and Waterlooville. And yet all the pollsters seemed to caution against this: “They’ve virtually picked up all the seats they could pick up from the Tories,” said John Curtice, while Luke Tryl, the director of More in Common, said that they’re more likely to attract “Progressive Activists” than One-Nation Tories. But are there any moderates left?

An even greater existential problem for the Lib Dems, if they really are serious about fighting Reform, is that only 24% of voters think they represent change, compared with 51% for Reform. And change is what voters want. But Farage’s Britain is the only future that Davey sees: there was no sense that the Liberal Democrats could change Britain, or especially wanted to. Beyond their dismissal of the “turquoise Tories”, the policies they unveiled could have been implemented by any government since 1997. An energy security bank to offer £10 billion in affordable loans to homeowners and small businesses. Solar panels in supermarket car parks. Health warnings on smartphones. All that was followed by sclerotic debates over ID cards and nuclear energy, and the late-woke silencing of a trans debate via trenchantly polite reference to procedure and “namecalling”. One quiffy-haired Young Liberal told me his party was a “party of fucking nerds”, known for their obsession with forensic policy analysis. And so they were as angry as Liberals can get when, on Monday, the BBC led with Reform’s decision to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain, because, of course, their overnight policy release — a two-hour “doomscrolling cap” for under-18s — was so much more radical.

The trouble is, centrism is a hard sell these days. One evening in the Branksome Suite, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) hosted a fringe event on “disruptive delivery”, where the Lib Dems were urged to assume the mantle of radical centrism. This, they said, is how to beat Farage. Sam Sharps, an ageless technocrat from the TBI, told the party’s deputy-leader Daisy Cooper that “there is no reason why you can’t be radical and sensible… There is no reason why you can’t have a transformational, thought-through, nicely-packaged, costed, implementable policy programme.” That, of course, is what the TBI’s other pet project — the Labour Party — offered with their “fully funded and fully costed” 2024 manifesto: this way lies madness, spending-cuts, tax rises, and an ever-accreting fiscal blackhole.

One disgruntled crowd-member asked them why nobody was speaking about the economy at this conference, and later three other questioners broke into tears: one had lost their seat on a parish council; another’s pub had been bought by the Chinese; another was scared of being a minority in today’s Britain. This is what Britain does to you: it grinds you down until you’re crying in a gray conference room as a think-tanker explains the benefits of bloodless technocracy.

The Liberal Democrats spent four days saying that they would address such griefs, but never did. They can criticize Farage, but they can’t combat him. And try as Davey might to put fire in their bellies, they can only see themselves as an opposition-in-waiting, not a government; they are the new reactionaries who’ll meekly defend the institutions as the Reform party blazes through them. The orders were clear: sharpen your best Farage insults, and prepare yourselves for opposition.

In the run up to the election, the papers mostly gave Davey an easy ride (as it were), seemingly unwilling to be scathing about what might yet turn out to be the inspired manoeuvres of an emerging national treasure. International media outlets didn’t help, seizing the opportunity to resurrect one of their favourite national stereotypes, the loveable British eccentric. And another factor enabling the horror to hide in plain sight was the general level of cringeworthy memification throughout the campaign, with Dawn Butler rapping, Jeremy Corbyn pretending he knows how to wash a car (or indeed what a car is), and Nigel Farage garnering 8.5 million TikTok views while doing an Eminem impression. Viewed in passing, the Lib Dem approach just looked like more of the same, but in fact it was much worse.

Of course, politics has long included gimmicks from MPs hoping to make a splash: who could forget David Cameron being pulled along by Norwegian huskies in 2006, or the much-derided “Edstone” in 2015? And then there was the biggest and most cunning stunt of all during the  2012 London Olympics:  the ne plus ultra of making a self-referential tit of yourself, apparently endearing Boris Johnson to a large part of the public for a generation, and followed up by various daft photo opportunities when he was running for national office. But even those ridiculous exploits were as nothing to the single-minded intensity of the Davey project, which saw him pratfalling in various locations around the country for a full six weeks: not so much offering lots of speeches punctuated by the odd bit of shenanigans, as 90% shenanigans interspersed with occasional bits of chat and weeping to camera about his dead parents.

Some of the appearances were justified by party masterminds as being vaguely connected to a particular policy objective — though, rather like their leader’s Zumba dancing, the explanations given were often a bit of an awkward stretch. Bungee-jumping in Eastbourne was supposed to tempt people into trying something heartstoppingly terrifying for the very first time: namely, voting Liberal Democrat, which seemed to be saying the quiet part out loud. Repeatedly falling from a surfboard into the Cornish foam was allegedly done in order to highlight the problem of sewage in our seas, though the degree of enthusiasm Davey conveyed for the experience tended to suggest exactly the opposite. Careering down a waterslide was about improving mental health for young people — yet it remained unclear how incipient adolescent anxiety would be improved by the sight of a 58-year old political leader perched precariously on a rubber ring, gurning ecstatically like a giant toddler as he hurtled down the slope.

Another explanation for Davey’s behaviour resembled the sort of justification sometimes offered by Just Stop Oil activists or, for that matter, school shooters: namely, it was the only way to get media attention for their cause, otherwise known at Lib Dem HQ as winning the “air war”.  This defence would perhaps have worked better had more people been able to work out what the cause was supposed to be, exactly. And in fact — like Farage’s memes on behalf of Reform — the main point of the appearances seemed to be to convey something about the leader in particular, and nothing very specific about his party and their policies at all.

Yet even here, the level of information offered was remedial. We mostly learnt that Davey doesn’t take himself too seriously: “I’m quite happy to have some fun,” he declared, shortly after skidding downhill in Wales on a bike with legs cartoonishly akimbo, just in case anyone had missed the point. Equally, we discovered that behind the smile lies heartache, with several affecting personal tragedies in his past. In a video, interviews, and press releases, Davey saw Starmer’s touching tale of a disabled mother and raised him  two dead parents at a young age, a dead Nanna, and a disabled son for whom he has significant caring responsibilities. So heavily was the latter mined for relevance to a manifesto pledge to increase the Carer’s Allowance, it sometimes seemed as if the policy had been designed around Davey personally.

It’s hard to be rude about someone whose public persona is so guileless: an enthusiastic, kindly, hammy Church of England type, as written by Richard Curtis on a good day and Armando Iannucci on a bad one. But politics isn’t care work nor is it a sitcom. The fact remains that despite some of the positive headlines it attracted, Davey’s CBeebies-style campaign indicated a staggeringly infantilising attitude towards the electorate. It seemed clear that either senior members in the Lib Dems are childish morons, or that they believe that voters are.

Perhaps it was assumed that by minimising the use of words altogether in their campaign material, they could maximise voter appeal while avoiding gaffes and the spectre of future broken promises. Political slogans already tend to be vacant and indecipherable anyway, allowing hearers to project whatever they want into the void. Labour’s key message argued gnomically for “Change”, while the Conservatives went with “Clear Plan. Bold Action. Secure Future” — though it was a testimony to their history of incompetence that even this vague statement of intent seemed patently unachievable.

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Yet there are also signs that Lib Dem strategists assumed that Davey’s clowning would be of interest to middle-class former Tory strongholds in particular, stuffed as they are presumably thought to be with soft-hearted, financially insulated types, low on political analysis but big on heartwarming feels. This seems indicated by what they called the “Gail’s strategy” — targeting wealthy Southern towns with a Gail’s bakery in the vicinity for a bit of the Davey magic, anticipating these as the places with the biggest chance of shifting disgruntled voters towards Liberal Democrats. One might question the sagacity of this plan on a number of levels: not least because what makes a sourdough-lover from Chichester smile ruefully or wipe away an empathic tear is likely to grate heavily upon a sausage roll-lover from Bolton. But there’s also the fact that even in the most insufferably smug of Southern enclaves, chock full of Dryrobe-wearing wankers nursing spelt loaves and worrying about property development in their area, most voters are just not that stupid.

The most likely explanation of any Lib Dem victories emerging today is that people were utterly fed up with the Tories, not that their heads were positively turned by the sight of G-forces acting on the face of an otherwise rather dull man on a rollercoaster. If anything, for all we know, the inanity of the campaign might have worked against the party: even among the positive press coverage, there were signs of ambivalence in onlookers. Meanwhile, there is also evidence that younger voters found the use of electoral memes patronising and off-putting generally. It would be good if pollsters would make an attempt to confirm these hypotheses now, for fear that correlation is lazily taken to indicate causation and we are subjected to even more fatuous levels of japery in five years’ time.

Satisfying as it may be on some atavistic level, I don’t want to see political figures shot into the air, toppling into water, or bouncing around on giant inflatables; I’d rather just hear them talk about what they intend to do and how they will do it. In a supposedly democratic society, it doesn’t seem a lot to ask. There’s a lot of work to do in the next four years, and many massive challenges lie ahead; not least the multipartisan challenge of making politics serious again. In whatever other ways politicians will fail spectacularly, I wonder if they can at least manage that.

Back in 2012, as the Lib Dems were really starting to suffer for their role in the Coalition government, some commentators  and some Conservatives started to speculate that growing unpopularity could force the smaller party out of government.

Others, perhaps more familiar with the Lib Dems, saw more resilience in the party. One of the more colourful bits of analysis noted this extreme resilience, comparing the party’s ability to survive political damage to the apocryphal cockroaches that will supposedly survive even a nuclear winter.

Most people would be mildly unhappy at being called cockroaches, but the Lib Dems wore it as a badge of pride — literally.  The party press office had yellow cockroach badges run up for that year’s party conference. The joke stuck, and at the 2013 party conference, Tim Farron, then the party president, cheerily called his party “cockroaches and nutters” from the podium.  Party members loved it.

Fast forward to 2020, and winter has well and truly arrived for the Lib Dems. This weekend, they will meet, virtually, at an online party conference that will attract little attention — and not just because of the huge events taking place elsewhere in British national life right now.

The story of the Lib Dems in 2020 can be told in two numbers. The first is 2 – that’s the percentage of voters in Wales who backed the Lib Dems in a recent poll.  Dismal, but hardly inconsistent with the party’s general standing. The Politico Poll of Polls currently puts the Lib Dems on 6%, far behind the Tories on 41% and Keir Starmer’s Labour on 39%.

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A year ago, that same tracker put the Lib Dems on 20%, snapping at Labour’s heels on 24%, and even Jo Swinson’s general election failure in 2019 saw the Lib Dems take 11.5% of the vote last December.

The other number that explains the state of the party today  is 998. That’s the number of words in the official party definition of transphobia that the Federal Board of the Liberal Democrats (more about party structure in a minute) recently adopted as the party’s official position on what constitutes discrimination against trans people, and people who suport them. (“Transphobia, whether through words or action, may be targeted at people who are, or who are perceived to be, trans or trans allies…”)

Really, the various Lib Dem sub-groups and working parties who laboured over this epic could have saved themselves a lot of time, because those 998 words can be expressed in just three: everything is transphobic. Still, the words do merit some attention here, because that statement says rather a lot about the Lib Dems today. How on earth does a party that can count JS Mill among its forebears end up seeking the outlaw the use of the phrase “biological man”?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking in the polls because they are staunch supporters of trans rights, or that the British public is deserting them as a result. I’m suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking because they’ve become fixated on things that are of no urgent interest to the majority of that public. British voters, by and large, are neither pro- nor- anti-trans: they’re just more interested in stuff like the pandemic, the NHS and the fate of the economy.

People aren’t even that interested in Brexit: the most recent Ipsos Issues Tracker showed barely a third of voters mentioned it as a top priority. Whatever the outcome of the Brexit process, voters have mostly moved on, and Keir Starmer has proved it. The Remain-voting leader of Remain-backing party has recently been urging Boris Johnson to get on with Brexit — with barely a murmur of protest from his party.

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Brexit, of course, was the adrenaline shot that restarted the Lib Dems’ failing heart in the years after coalition. Under Vince Cable and then Swinson, the party took increasingly stark positions against the policy chosen by more than 17 million voters in 2016. That drew in a new wave of members, the sort of people who spend time on #FBPE Twitter inveighing against extremist elements in British politics and not seeing the irony.

The new Lib Dems were delighted when Swinson promised to “cancel Brexit”, but the old cockroaches weren’t so sure. British history might have been rather different if Swinson had listened to Lib Dems like Norman Lamb, then the MP for North Norfolk, who warned that the “cancel Brexit” stance would help to polarise politics and “open the door” to Boris Johnson to win big.

But the Lib Dems didn’t listen, and actually rushed to open that door: it should not be forgotten that the 2019 election only happened because Swinson believed it was in her party’s best interest to allow Johnson to go the country.

Today, Brexit is not done but, endorsed in a referendum and a general election, it is a settled fact of British politics. That has left the Lib Dems, once again, searching for a purpose. That brings us back to transphobia, and the identity politics that seem to be all the party has to offer.

Log on to the Lib Dem website today the first thing you’ll see is a crowd of earnest young people holding rainbow flags and #LoveisLove placards. It’s the site of a Pride rally, not a political party.

Again, to be clear, this isn’t an argument that the Lib Dems should take a different position on gay rights, trans rights or any other part of that rainbow-flag agenda. For a party targeting younger, degree-educated urban voters, there’s a certain sense in that positioning, especially when Starmer is so carefully trying to avoid Tory attempts to draw him into a culture war where he can be painted as the head of a “woke liberal” party.

Nor is that different position really an option for Ed Davey, the Lib Dems’ sober new leader and a cockroach who first worked for the party in the early 1990s. One of the things that makes the Lib Dems different is their insistence on internal democracy and rules. The party machinery is a network of committees and boards, all with real internal power. If a small group can control an official “Specified Associated Organisation” such as LGBT+ Lib Dems, they can and do help set party policy and priorities.  Weaning the Lib Dems off identity politics probably isn’t an option for Davey.

A better approach would be to put the rainbow flags in perspective: make them part of the Lib Dem offer — but not all of it. Once, not too long ago, the Lib Dems were the most effective think-tank in British politics, an outfit relentlessly churning out policy ideas that were perfectly sensible but just a little too far ahead of their time for bigger parties to embrace.

Yet Davey has taken the leadership of a party that has little to say about the bread-and-butter issues of politics and government that still motivate the typical voter. The party did develop some sound policies last year — insulating low-income homes; a £10,000 training allowance for all adults — but these were inevitably drowned out by noise about Brexit.

The irony of Lib Dem irrelevance on policy today is so sharp you could shave with it.

If it were to be revealed that Dominic Cummings was a card-carrying Lib Dem who used to sit on the Federal Policy Committee in the early 2000s, no one familiar with the party in those days would be remotely surprised. Industrial Strategy, regional policy, unpicking pension tax perks for high-earners and obscure local government reform: these are all things Lib Dems spent years talking about, to no avail. Anyone looking for the policies that flesh out the Johnson-Cummings promise of “leveling up” could do worse than look at the unread policy papers that Cable and others used to churn out.

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Likewise on the green economy.  It has been reported recently that the PM has become fascinated with the role that hydrogen could play in a new low-carbon economy.

If only he’d attended a few Lib Dem conferences in the cockroach days, when Lib Dems enjoyed nothing more than a day dreaming about the carbon-free economy of 2030. When I chaired a fringe meeting on energy policy at last year’s Lib Dem conference, everyone enjoyed it when a very detailed row broke out between audience members about the precise size of hydrogen molecules; Davey, a panelist, cheerily joined in. This is a party that takes the detail of policy seriously.

What happens to the Lib Dems next will depend in part on who is left in the party. The FBPE crowd were largely not “proper” Lib Dem cockroaches; many of them were happy to have a membership card and a direct debit, but not for them pounding the pavements delivering Focus leaflets or going to conference for Glee Club. There are still some very serious Lib Dems in local government, however, and I suspect many of the old cockroaches are still there, even if some younger types with blue hair and pronouns now make more noise.

Will that be a solid enough foundation on which Davey can start to rebuild? And if so, what will he construct?  What is the role for the Liberal Democrats in a political system that is starting to look at least partially post-liberal? A fair bit depends on what Starmer does, but all the signs are that he’s listening to his very clever policy chief Claire Ainsley and trying to reconnect Labour with the values of the voters it lost to Johnson last year: Rule Britannia, VE Day and even Get Brexit Done.

Some Lib Dems may think that leaves a gap in the market for a truly progressive party: more rainbow flags and BLM slogans, and rejecting voters who believe the “wrong” things. In other words, offering sort of politics that Americans call “liberal left”.

As an outsider who runs a centrist think-tank, I’d suggest the Lib Dem aim should be something else: to make the case for a rather older idea of liberalism, one where personal freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand and people are trusted to make their own choices within a clear set of rules.

The two big parties are quietly agreeing a broad consensus that the size and power of the state should grow: assuming Johnson leads his party into the next election, don’t be surprised to see him battling Starmer over who can promise to do the most, spend the most, in the Red Wall and elsewhere. After all, money is cheap and the huge challenge of the pandemic demands a new paradigm, right?

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Economically, we have already entered the new world: the Conservative Party is waging political war on allies and institutions in order to obtain the power to use state spending to support companies favoured by ministers and their super-bright advisers. Likewise the rules and instructions rolled out in response to Covid-19, some of which constitute a remarkable extension of state power in daily life.

Who speaks for the dissenters, for those who’d like some more checks and balances on the people in charge? Who will make the case for rules on the role of the state in markets and in people’s lives? I am no liberterian but the absence of a clear liberal voice in British politics unnerves me sometimes. And as someone who still thinks Mill’s On Liberty is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, it saddens me to see “liberal” attached to causes and ideas that are keener to smother dissenting opinions than protect them.

Is there yet a role for a liberal Lib Dem party? Do the Lib Dems want to be that party? Here, Davey might want to pay attention to the detail of some recent YouGov polling on those Covid interventions, which asked people if they would follow ministerial encouragement to shop their fellow citizens to the police for meeting in groups of more than six.

No fewer than 43% of Conservative voters would report strangers to the police, and 29% would make a similar call about neighbours; 15% of Tories would even call the cops on family members. Lib Dems, meanwhile, were the voter-group least likely to snitch: only 26% would call the police on strangers, 21% about neighbours, and 7% on family.

https://twitter.com/cagyarrow/status/1306920845911224321?s=20

Britain may be heading down the road of post-liberal politics and a bigger state, but liberalism is neither dead nor doomed to irrelevance. Lib Dem cockroaches need to decide if they want to keep scuttling on.