The jury’s not out on Ed Davey – even Lib Dems don’t like him…

…that’s if you’re the kind of party member who wants their leader to take a firm position on rejoining the EU. But that, writes John Rentoul as Lib Dems gather in Bournemouth, isn’t his – or the party’s – only problem

The main cause of discontent is the Liberal Democrat leader’s refusal to make more of the case for Britain rejoining the EU (PA)

Ed Davey is surprisingly unpopular with some members of his own party. “I never expected to like Ed, but I didn’t know he’d be this bad,” one of them told me as they prepared for this weekend’s party conference in Bournemouth.

The main cause of this discontent is the Liberal Democrat leader’s refusal to make more of the case for Britain rejoining the EU. “I heard him at the spring conference,” said my dissident. “He was asked about Brexit – he dodged the question and refused to answer. It was quite awful.”

Davey has also been criticised by the organisers of Saturday’s National Rejoin March in London. They say he was invited to speak, or send a video, “but didn’t reply”. Meanwhile in Bournemouth on Saturday, the first day of the Lib Dem conference, a fringe meeting at lunchtime organised by “concerned members” will demand “bolder messaging” – which is internal party code for an anti-Brexit push to rejoin the EU single market and customs union.

It will be chaired by Layla Moran, the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, who was defeated by Davey for the leadership three years ago. The headliner is Professor John Curtice, “whose polling suggests the Lib Dems would do a lot better with clearer messaging”, according to the organisers – although I suspect the Prof’s actual interpretation of the evidence will be that it is a bit more complicated than that.

Prof Curtice’s carefully balanced analysis will not prevent the frustration of the Lib Dem Rejoiners from exploding this weekend. They think the party is staring a historic opportunity in the face, and doing nothing with it. With a majority of those expressing an opinion telling pollsters they would vote to rejoin in a new referendum on EU membership, they cannot understand why Davey should choose to pussyfoot around the question and present the Lib Dems as a pale imitation of the Labour Party, with its reflex recoil from any suggestion of Britain going back into the single market.

Other members are more sympathetic to their leader, pointing out that the party is doing well in by-elections – the party has gained four MPs this parliament – and that it has to tread a careful line as the general election approaches. Almost all Lib Dem target seats are Conservative-held, and although many of them are in the Remain-y Home Counties, a lot of them are in the Brexit-y South-West.

These members understand that Davey has to be all things to all people if the party is to make the kind of broad-based advance that finally led to the breakthrough into government in 2010. Even if they think a more pro-EU message would pay dividends, they “don’t want to rock boats” in the year before a general election.

Some of them point out that Davey has been pushed from his position at the start of 2021, when he told Andrew Marr on the BBC: “We are not a rejoin party.” By the end of that year, the Lib Dem conference had agreed a compromise policy, which is worth quoting in full: “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 concluded with its vision of a Liberal Democrat future, including: “Britain is once more a member of the EU.”

Davey could obviously live with “rejoin” as a distant aspiration, but he has made little of it since – and it is not as if he has made a big deal of anything else either, his internal critics point out. The party has failed to capitalise on its history of greenery in the national debate about net zero – which was triggered by the expansion of the ultra-low emissions zone in London, which paradoxically is about clean air locally and nothing to do with climate change.

Davey himself, as energy secretary in the coalition government, has failed to make anything of his expertise and experience in the subject. Most party members know that, although proportional representation is a distinctive policy, the voters don’t care about it. Some of them are nostalgic for the days of Paddy Ashdown’s leadership, when he hauled the party back from the depths of obscurity with policies such as a penny on income tax for education: at least it gave them something positive to say that differentiated the party from Labour and the Tories.

Davey’s critics say that the only distinctive position he has adopted recently was in the trans rights debate, when he said that “quite clearly” a woman can have a penis. Why, they ask, would you tie yourself to a position that is different from that of the two main parties but unpopular, when you could adopt a distinctive position that is popular?

Davey’s calculation, although he cannot say it, is that few pro-EU voters would in practice flock to the Lib Dems if they put “Rejoin” up in lights. Most rejoiners would be happy to vote Labour in places where Labour are the challengers to a Tory MP, and would be equally happy to vote Lib Dem where they are in second place, without any additional pro-EU prompting.

The idea is for the Lib Dems to benefit from anti-Tory, pro-EU tactical voting, while keeping their right flank as open as possible to soft Tory and soft Leave disillusioned voters. It is a bit too cynical an argument to be expressed in public, so the Lib Dems will this weekend have a big proxy argument about Europe instead.