Ed Davey is needlessly giving up bargaining power for the Lib Dems years before an election

Davey should know there is no harm in keeping both Labour and the Conservatives guessing about his plans, writes John Rentoul

Ed Davey prepares to speak to a virtual Lib Dem conference last year (PA)

I am not leaving this showroom without buying that car, but I think you are asking too much for it. That is from my imaginary copy of How Not to Negotiate for Beginners. Another example from that book is a leader of the Liberal Democrats saying they will definitely not form a coalition with one or other of the two larger parties.

There are many silly things a Lib Dem leader can say before an election. Two years ago today I was in Bournemouth for the last in-person Lib Dem conference, looking at a glossy pamphlet that declared: “Jo Swinson: Britain’s next prime minister.” Today, I am reading Ed Davey’s interview with the Financial Times, in which he was asked if the Lib Dems would facilitate a Conservative government at the next election and replied: “No.”

In other words, if you vote Lib Dem at the next election, you will be making a Labour government even more likely. Obviously, any vote for a party other than the Conservatives makes a Labour government more likely, in the sense that the alternative prime minister in a hung parliament is Keir Starmer – and given that we can rule out, as emphatically as the voters did last time, the prospect of the Lib Dem leader becoming prime minister.

But there are voters in places like Chesham and Amersham who are more likely to vote Lib Dem if they think it is a way of curbing the excesses of Johnsonism rather than a one-way ticket to a Labour government.

Davey doesn’t seem to want those votes. He may be right that he has come across many people on the doorsteps who say that they “won’t vote Conservative until Johnson goes”. There are many Tory voters who don’t like Boris Johnson much. “The sorts of liberal Conservatives we were talking to were unhappy about the foreign aid cuts; they don’t think he’s handled the pandemic well and were not impressed by his style of government,” Davey said. “They don’t think he’s a decent man; they think he is a populist who plays to the mob.”

They sound awfully like Labour voters to me, and the lesson of the Chesham and Amersham by-election, which the Lib Dem candidate won in a cynical nimbyist campaign in June, was that Labour voters will quite happily vote Lib Dem if they think it will GTTO (Get The Tory Out).

What is really surprising about the preview of Davey’s speech, which he will deliver to a second consecutive virtual party conference this weekend, is that he is explicit about history repeating itself.

Bear with me for a nostalgia tour of 1990s anti-Tory nerdery, but Davey started it by apparently intending to refer in his conference address to Paddy Ashdown’s Chard speech of 1992. That was when Ashdown gambled on ending the historic Liberal posture of equidistance between the two main parties, and positioned the Lib Dems as part of an anti-Tory progressive movement. This didn’t mean that Lib Dem and Labour candidates would stand down to give each other a clear run, but it did mean that each party would try less hard in seats where the other had a better chance of beating the Tory.

The assumption of the Chard speech – “Labour can no longer win on their own” – was soon swept aside, and Ashdown’s twin hopes of ministerial office and electoral reform both faded, although Tony Blair tactfully kept them alive long after his landslide election victory made them unnecessary.

Just as the Lib Dems have gone back in time 29 years, so has the Labour Party, and next week’s Labour conference (which will be in person) will be inundated with motions demanding electoral reform and a progressive alliance with other parties. In 1992, after four election defeats, John Smith, the Labour leader, set up a commission under Raymond Plant to look at changing the voting system. It proposed the system that is now used for mayors and for police and crime commissioners (the supplementary vote). But it didn’t happen for parliamentary elections, and neither did Roy Jenkins’s plan (the alternative vote plus top-up MPs from party lists) that was drawn up under Blair’s government.

It wasn’t until the Lib Dems finally held the balance of power in a hung parliament in 2010 that they got a referendum on the alternative vote system, and lost it. The lesson of the 2010 election result may be that the Lib Dems should have driven a harder bargain. At one point, Labour came close to offering them electoral reform without a referendum. But Nick Clegg had already weakened his negotiating position by saying he would talk to the party with the most seats first. It sounded reasonable, but there was no reason to do it. He might have got more out of David Cameron if he had allowed a Labour coalition to seem a more realistic threat.

Now Davey seems to be making the same mistake, but in Labour’s favour rather than that of the Tories. Perhaps the assumption is always that the Lib Dems will help turf out whichever party of government has just lost ground to produce a hung parliament, but there would be no harm in keeping both parties guessing – and in giving Tory-minded voters more of a reason for casting their protest votes for the Lib Dems.