It’s become a weekly occurrence for me. Thursday night, open iPlayer, switch on BBC 1. Fiona Bruce introduces the panel that follows the usual formula: someone from the government, a Tory, a journalist, an American of some description, and a Liberal Democrat.
“Oh yeah – I forgot about them.”
And I’m not the only one. After the general election, the Lib Dems have had a full-on ‘retreat from public life’ on a Duke of York scale. They’ve vanished entirely from our X feeds and they’ve vacated the pages of our newspapers and the screens of our televisions.
They are, allegedly, Britain’s third largest political party. But not only do they lose out to Labour and the Tories in the political attention economy- they’re being thoroughly trounced by Reform too. This, of course, isn’t news to anyone. Were an alien to land in a Westminster pub and overhear enough conversations they’d believe that Nigel Farage was the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch was leader of a distant, trailing third party (or perhaps they’d think Robert Jenrick was Tory leader) – and they wouldn’t be able to tell you who Ed Davey was if you paid them. In the most oversimplified of terms: no one is talking about the Lib Dems.
The ugly reality of the situation is, from a Lib Dem perspective, utterly embarrassing. According to Google Trends, public interest in the party is but a trace amount compared to their political rivals. The last time The Spectator published an article about them was September of last year. Inputting ‘Reform UK’ into The Times’ online archive returns 23 articles written last month. The figure for the Liberal Democrats is three.
Last year’s general election was exalted as the party’s greatest victory this century – a return to the sunlit uplands, following a long march of humiliation through the 2019 parliament. Ed Davey was brandishing 3 select committee chairs and 72 MPs – it was a jubilant comeback.
In purely electoral terms, the first half of this decade was the Liberal Democrats’ nadir. But the current failures of the party to be noticed are the party’s true lowest ebb. Their situation goes to the heart of their political movement, to their philosophy as Britain’s third political party. “What’s the point of the Lib Dems?” has been a constant jibe for the entire duration of the party’s existence in its current iteration. But now, given their complete absence from the field of battle, it’s a question that needs answering urgently.
If the Liberal Democrats can’t achieve their goals (though their lack of ability to define what those might be is half the problem) with a record number of seats, then they are finished as a party. Should their only notable characteristics continue to be nothing more than ‘not Labour’ and ‘not the Tories’, by definition they can be usurped by literally anyone. And given the fact that a political party that isn’t Labour and isn’t the Tories is currently leading in the opinion polls, the Liberal Democrats are merrily skipping towards what could be their doom.
