If the Lib Dems learn the lessons of the past, they could be in with a real chance in the next election

Being the ‘party of Remain’ has suddenly become a major vote winner. The question now is how far can it take them?

The local and European parliamentary elections this May provided a striking turn around, looking back.

For the Lib Dems they meant after years of polling consistently below 10 per cent, a sudden burst in support saw them take a slew of council and EU parliament seats and poll as high as 24 per cent in June.

Being the “party of Remain” suddenly became a major vote winner. The question now is how far can this take them. To top of the polls? Back to 60 seats? Holding the balance of power? Surely all of the 48 per cent who backed Remain the 2016 referendum are in play?

To answer these questions, it helps to go back to the beginning of the Lib Dems Europe strategy. That does not mean to the day the EU referendum was lost or even when the campaign started. A similar strategy was tried, at least in part, in 2014, when I was deputy head of policy at Lib Dem headquarters.

That was in the lead-up to the 2014 European parliamentary elections when Nick Clegg challenged Nigel Farage to a debate on the EU. That debate was reported as a major victory for Farage in the next day’s headlines. Many probably wondered why Nick and our team took it on. The logic was actually very simple. If you looked at opinion surveys on attitudes to Europe at the time about 15 to 20 per cent of people felt “strongly” in favour of staying in the EU. (A similar number felt strongly about a liberal immigration system).

If you are polling at around 8 per cent (as we were at the time) and you take a strong stance on an issue that 15 to 20 per cent care deeply about, you stand to gain their votes. Or at least you are fishing in that pool of voters. At the time, that didn’t have a great impact – in 2014 Europe was not high up on the public’s agenda. The NHS and the economy drove the subsequent 2015 general election campaign. Although immigration was also high up in voters’ minds.

This takes us back to the question of how far being the party of Remain can take the Lib Dems. What is interesting is that the Lib Dem vote share has ranged between 16 and 24 per cent since May. A similar range to those who strongly supported the EU in 2014.

What finally seems to have changed this May, only a month or so after Brexit was supposed to have happened, is that Europe became an issue that determined the votes of strongly pro-Europeans. Perhaps combined with a final loss of faith in Labour’s Remain credentials.

That also may contain a message for how far this strategy can take the Lib Dems. It seems that passionate pro-Europeans are willing to cast their vote for the party of Remain, but not the whole 48 per cent. So it might then be that the Lib Dem Europe strategy has almost exhausted the support it can get.

As the “Brexitshambles” continues that may change, but the fact that it hasn’t yet suggests that if the Lib Dems are going to reach and exceed the 20 per cent celling at a general election they will need a broader message.

What that should be is a harder question, and of course anything close to 20 per cent support would be a huge success in a snap general election this year. Nonetheless, it is something that should – and no doubt will – be on Jo Swinson and her team’s mind as they look to the future.

Steve O’Neil was deputy head of policy for the Liberal Democrats between 2013-15