Is there life for the Lib Dems after their ‘Stop Brexit’ campaign?

Everyone knows the Lib Dems want to stop Brexit, but that’s not always been true of its voters. Some 750,000 of them backed Leave in the 2016 referendum; one-third of all those who’d voted for the party in the previous year’s general election.

One thing’s for sure: Jo Swinson’s ‘Stop Brexit’ campaign is not designed to win these voters back. A recent YouGov poll suggested just four per cent of Leave voters will support the Lib Dems at this election. Instead, the party has banked its fortunes on being the ‘Remainiest’ party contesting this election, as part of its effort to build a ‘core vote’ based on a coherent set of values – rather than, as in the past, relying on the Stakhanovite efforts of individual MPs in seats dotted around the country to keep the liberal flame alive. That, indeed, was the chief attraction of the revoke policy to Jo Swinson and party members when it was enthusiastically adopted at the party’s autumn conference.