Why has Ed Davey been throwing himself in the water to win the Lib Dems votes?

While the other parties appear to have been taking the election campaign seriously, Ed Davey has been having enormous fun. Political editor David Maddox explains that there is a clever political calculation behind the Lib Dem leader’s frivolity

When Neil Kinnock became Labour leader in October 1983, he was infamously pictured falling backwards on Brighton beach. It was an image of haplessness that dogged his nine-year leadership right up until his second general election defeat in 1992.

Yet 41 years later, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey seems to be making a virtue of being pictured falling into water at any opportunity, whether it is from a boat or losing his balance on a tightrope.

Not only that, but images of him on a water slide, a funfair ride, hurtling downhill on a bike, playing a giant blue version of Jenga (to represent the Tory blue wall) and more have punctuated an otherwise dull and predictable election campaign.

There have been serious moments, too, such as when he talked about being a carer for his disabled son, but this has been a campaign in which the Lib Dem leader is definitely having a lot of fun while his opponents wallow in apparent misery and seriousness.

Ed Davey rides the Ultimate Slip ’n’ Slide attraction near Frome, Somerset, while on the campaign trail (PA)

But is it really a winning strategy? Why is a political leader risking mockery and ridicule? Is he not taking the issues as seriously as they deserve?

In fact, Davey is pursuing a highly effective campaign, and the strategy’s surprising origins lie with a former Scottish Conservative leader who became a beloved figure in politics north of the border.

How Annabel Goldie revived the Tories in Scotland

Many people credit Ruth Davidson – now Baroness Davidson – with leading the Tory comeback in Scotland. And while it is true that she deserves much credit, she would not have succeeded without the foundations laid by Annabel Goldie – also now Baroness Goldie, but “Bella” to many who know her well.

Back in 2007, the Scottish Tories were the forgotten party of politics in Scotland. They were the fourth-largest, with no constituency members of the Scottish parliament (MSPs) – only those on the top-up party list.

The Holyrood (Scottish parliament) election that year was seen as a race between the Labour first minister Jack McConnell and the newly recrowned SNP leader Alex Salmond, with the Iraq war very much at the heart of the campaign.

Salmond went on to scrape a victory, heralding an unbroken run of SNP rule in Scotland that has lasted to the present day, and dominated the campaign, while McConnell – now Lord McConnell – visibly shrank before his opponent and saw his party lose power.

Annabel Goldie campaigns in Buchanan Street in Glasgow in 2015 (Getty)

With Labour’s former coalition partners, the Lib Dems, also in freefall, only one other political leader made an impression – Bella Goldie.

She decided on a counterintuitive, untried campaign strategy that involved performing a series of what appeared to be mad stunts. This included a visit to the climbing wall in Leith and a series of other bizarre photo calls. Apparently the only one she turned down was jumping out of a plane with a union jack parachute.

The most famous was actually at a Scottish Tory conference at Ayr racecourse, where a Harley-Davidson biker convention was also being held. It took Goldie just a brief time to appear on a motorcycle, making a risque remark about “throbbing machines” surrounded by leather-clad men.

All this helped to detoxify the Tory brand in Scotland, and Goldie was always among the top two favourite political leaders, on both sides of the Scottish independence divide.

Willie Rennie, then leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, waterskis during a European election campaign event in 2021 (Getty)

Willie Rennie wrestling sheep

The Lib Dems first took a leaf from Goldie’s book in the 2016 Holyrood election.

When Willie Rennie, a former Westminster parliamentary colleague of Ed Davey, became leader of the Scottish Lib Dems in 2011, their situation was dire. The Tories had pushed them into a distant third place on just five seats, and they were seen as an irrelevance. Then they were part of the “Better Together” anti-independence coalition with the Conservatives and Labour in the 2014 referendum, which tarnished their brand further.

Come the 2016 election for the Scottish parliament, the Scottish Lib Dems were struggling for airtime and newspaper column inches. So Rennie embarked on his own series of stunts. He was pictured wrestling a sheep, sitting in a giant deckchair in front of the Forth Bridge, waterskiing, and balancing an apple on his head with an arrow through it (William Tell style). He repeated the tactic at every election until 2021.

In 2016, he was trying to outdo the then new Scottish Tory leader Davidson, who was having her own photo-ops with quad bikes and the like. But if anybody is likely to have passed on advice to Davey, it may well have been Rennie.

So why does the tactic work?

To understand this, we need to go back to Goldie’s former director of communications, Ramsay Jones, who would later get a CBE after working for David Cameron in Downing Street.

He told The Independent: “You have to remember, when you are the third or fourth party, as we were back in 2007, it is very hard to get airtime.

“What we were aiming for was the picture of the day for the front of every newspaper, or three minutes of heartwarming coverage on Scotland Today. It worked, and Annabel was up for doing everything apart from the parachute jump. We found that it got us noticed and back on people’s radar.

“You have to remember that, while Ruth [Davidson] led us to all those gains, the foundation for recovery in Scotland was laid by Bella.”

Davey up to another election stunt (EPA)

The perfect tactic for Davey

Davey desperately needed something different. He was facing an election that would be dominated by Tory chaos, Labour pushing for power, and Nigel Farage dominating the airwaves for Reform UK.

The Lib Dems – who have an ambition to take 50-plus seats, and have a real chance to make inroads into the Tory blue wall in the South – were still in danger of being ignored, but Davey’s photo stunts have ensured that this has not been the case.

And with the recent growth in the role of social media – this being the first TikTok election – these stunts have proved to be even more effective than in the past.

But there was another reason for the strategy. When Goldie was poking fun at herself and her party in 2007 and then in 2011, she was doing it in an effort to detoxify a brand that had become poisonous in Scotland. Once she had finished in 2011, there were no longer any no-go areas for the Scottish Tories, as there had been since the late 1980s.

Davey also needs detoxification. He took a battering in the Horizon scandal earlier this year as the former Post Office minister who had failed to take action. His personal brand was linked strongly to the misery inflicted on hundreds of innocent people.

But now Davey is seen as an avuncular figure of fun. His image has been completely changed. It may help his party to make some remarkable gains on 4 July.