Your dad dancing days are over, crazy Davey

The electoral success of the Liberal Democrats owes much to the folksy charm of leader Ed Davey – but his conference address in Brighton is the last time he can get away with it, says Joe Murphy

Confetti falls as Lib Dem leader Ed Davey finishes his keynote speech in Brighton (PA )

Final day at party conference. Time for the big speech. Was this the moment Ed Davey finally abandoned cheesy stunts and revealed where he is leading the Lib Dems to?

Maybe not.

With an hour to go, Davey tweeted pictures of himself playing tennis badly wearing baggy gear that definitely wasn’t worthy of Waheed Alli’s cheque book. Turns out that while we were all listening to a dull morning session, he was performing for the cameras in the Brighton sunshine.

Still, maybe his speech would answer a few of the questions that this celebratory conference seemed to be desperately avoiding, like where the heck are the Lib Dems going over the next four years?

Davey bounced on stage to the strains of Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me”. Alarming echoes of Theresa May’s shimmying to “Dancing Queen”, which didn’t end well. Except that Davey actually sang along in a high-pitched, tuneless croak.

“If you need me, let me know, gonna be around,” he squeaked while waving to the crowd. Did he forget that his lapel mics would broadcast his hopeless rendition to the world? Or did he do it deliberately to make another social media meme? It’s honestly hard to tell for sure, but Slapstick Ed is a mighty convenient distraction.

Arrayed behind the Lib Dem leader were the other 71 MPs who, with him, make up their party’s largest haul of seats in over a century. That transformative success owes a lot to Davey’s folksy, silly, dad-dancing charm.

The number 72 appears everywhere in Brighton. It was mentioned seven times in Davey’s speech, compared with just two mentions of “Europe” which neatly sums up the conference narrative: celebrate now, deal with the hard stuff later.

So what did we learn from his speech? Mainly that Davey’s target is to “consign the Tory party to history” by overtaking them, starting with another raid into Conservative heartlands at next year’s county council elections. "What a great chance we have next May,” he encouraged.

Strikingly, he talked more about Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – two ex-PMs who lost office in 2022 – than he did about Keir Starmer. His ratio of attacks was roughly four goes at the Tories for every pop at Labour. The Lib Dems will be a “responsible opposition”, Davey assured us, which apparently means pointing its guns at the official opposition rather than the government.

There was a brief line on “the pressing need to fix our broken relationship with Europe … and put us on the road back to the single market”, but not when and how – and nothing at all about reversing Brexit.

The most developed sections of the speech covered familiar themes, in particular his own experience of being a carer. Yes, we have heard it before, but you could have heard a pin drop when he spoke of how he and wife Emily worry about their disabled son, John.

“No one will ever hold him the way we hold him. No one will ever love him the way we love him. I guess it’s an anxiety for all parents. What happens when you’re gone? But it’s so intense when your child will be vulnerable, all their life.”

He simultaneously attacked “prisons bursting at the seams” and “criminals walking free”, which suggests traditional Lib Dem cakeism will continue in this parliament.

His grimmest revelation (from the election trail) was that “it was only health and safety rules that stopped me putting my hand up a cow’s behind”. Hopefully, this is the final speech that Davey can get away with cunning stunts.

At the end, inevitably, the whole hall joined in a noisy chorus of “Sweet Caroline”, with Davey dancing off the stage.

Earlier, there were hints that some Lib Dems would like to do more than Tory bashing, photocalls and singing. Former leader Tim Farron made a speech on water quality that included the lines: “We will welcome Ed to this stage and rightly, I predict, cheer him to the rafters but let us not be satisfied with our big leap forward. We don’t just want a bigger Liberal Democrats, we want a better Britain.”

But the strikingly white and middle class audience didn’t look like they would be rocking Davey’s boat. Neither did a parade of newly elected MPs from counties like Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire who hogged the lectern, prompting grumbles from a few in the hall that ordinary members weren’t getting enough of a look-in.

“Thank you for having me,” said Charlie Maynard, the well-mannered MP for David Cameron’s posh former constituency of Witney, until July a Tory redoubt. Victoria Collins, MP for Harpenden and Berkhamsted, burbled about water voles and crayfish and paddling with children. They all had a go at the nasty water companies for dumping sewage in our rivers but nobody mentioned the damage to streams caused by run-off from chicken farms and fields full of fertilisers. Water fat cats make a much easier target than local farmers who have votes.

And for now, hard choices are something the Lib Dems are putting off until later.