Why does Ed Davey refuse to say that the Lib Dems want to rejoin the EU?

The Lib Dem leader seemed to disown his party’s policy when challenged by Ed Balls, writes John Rentoul

The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey (PA)

Brexit is “the elephant in the room of British politics”, Sir Ed Davey told the Liberal Democrat spring conference in York two months ago. He said that neither the Conservatives nor Labour wanted to talk about the costs of leaving the EU.

He said it was an elephant that the Lib Dems “always point to, even though other parties daren’t even whisper its name”. Yet when Ed Balls, the former shadow chancellor moonlighting as a presenter of Good Morning Britain, asked him about it, Sir Ed proved reluctant to say its name out loud.

Balls asked him if he would push Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, to reverse Brexit as part of a deal in the event of a hung parliament. The Lib Dem leader said that, “at the moment”, rejoining the EU “is not the issue; the issue is rebuilding trust with our European friends and neighbours”.

He resisted several attempts by Balls and Susannah Reid, his co-presenter, to accept that Lib Dem policy, as spelt out on the party’s website, is “ultimately” to rejoin the EU. So what is going on?

Many Lib Dem members cannot understand why their party leader is so reluctant to fill an obvious gap in the British political market, one which is an obvious fit for a party with a long history of support for EU membership.

Their puzzlement is shared by commentators. I wondered why the Lib Dems failed to become the “party of rejoin” immediately after the UK left the EU in the wake of the 2019 election. It seemed clear that a large proportion of Remainers would react to defeat by becoming more enthusiastic about the cause – just as pro-independence voters did in Scotland after 2014. I thought that this would give the Lib Dems a strongly motivated base of more than the 6 per cent of the electorate that supported them at the time.

Last weekend, Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP and Times columnist, wrote an article headed, “Lib Dems, get off the fence and fight Brexit.” As opinion polls show a large majority of British people now think that Brexit was a mistake, he thought Sir Ed was continuing to miss a golden opportunity.

Lib Dem members, too, have pressed the issue against a leader who is reluctant to commit the party. Because the Lib Dems are an unusually democratic party, though, a compromise was thrashed out at its last annual conference – which was in 2021, because last year’s was cancelled after the death of the Queen.

The party’s official policy, therefore, is this: “After Brexit, we argue for developing much closer relations with the UK’s former partners in the EU, to the benefit of British citizens and British companies; and we will work to create the conditions through which the UK is able to join the EU once again.”

The policy document concludes with its vision of a Liberal Democrat future, including: “Britain is once more a member of the EU, working with its European neighbours to tackle the major challenges of the century.”

Sir Ed is happy to have rejoining the EU as a distant objective, with a better relationship the short-term goal. I assume that his plan is to make the Lib Dems the natural home of second preferences and protest votes all over the UK, and he certainly has had stunning successes in restoring the Lib Dems to their former glory as by-election winners.

He must feel that to brand the Lib Dems as the party of rejoin would give a large section of the electorate a reason for not voting for them. So when he said at that spring conference in York in March that he would “shout” about the elephant in the room, all he said was: “If you want to boost our economy, you have to repair our broken relationship with Europe.”

As his interview on Good Morning Britain revealed, he is in the strange position of complaining that no one will mention the large tusked land animal in the room, while still refusing to call it an elephant.