Why Nigel Farage is becoming Ed Davey’s secret weapon

Ed Davey will be very happy about Nigel Farage’s political comeback. This might seem odd – Davey leads a socially liberal and vocally pro-EU party beloved by the latte sipping metropolitan professionals who loom large in Reform UK demonology. Yet it is the Liberal Democrats who stand to gain most from a Farage surge.

A little political history and a dash of political geography explains why. The Lib Dems had their own overlooked electoral surge last time, slashing Tory majorities in seats the length and breadth of the Home Counties. While they didn’t score any wins, they built a solid platform for this campaign, with dozens of strong second places leaving them well placed to profit from current Tory misfortunes.

Here’s where Farage comes in. He stood down his Brexit party candidates in every Tory-held seat in 2019, and most of those votes ended up in the Tory column. Now he and his candidates are back, big time. But while Farage is trying to present his campaign as an effort to supplant the Conservatives, Reform’s vote is too evenly spread, and the ceiling on their core support too low, for them to win more than a handful of seats. So their biggest impact is shifting the local balance of power, harming Tory prospects and helping their main opponents.

Hence Ed Davey’s happiness. By appealing to a chunk of the electorate the second-placed Lib Dems could never win, Farage lowers the bar for victory in dozens of Tory-Lib Dem battlegrounds. These are often well off and Remain-leaning places which Reform UK could never win outright. Yet by fielding candidates who split the right, Farage may help the Lib Dems win dozens of seats which would otherwise be out of reach.

There is no obvious solution to the Farage conundrum for Tory candidates in these seats. They need to hold Reform-curious voters to win, so they cannot afford to let a populist wildfire run through their right flank unaddressed. Yet they also need to hold Reform-hostile moderate voters to win. Tacking right with hardline messages on immigration or the ‘war on woke’ risks increasing defection to the Lib Dems among unhappy Tory moderates and intensifying tactical voting by third-place Labour or Green voters, who dislike Farage even more than the Sunak government.

The Lib Dems’ strategy in this campaign has been to present themselves as sensible, unthreatening people who those angry at the Tories can feel comfortable backing regardless of their own politics. Farage’s return makes running as an empty vessel of opposition that much easier. It provides a point of contrast – ‘we are sensible, moderate and delivery focussed, not like those populist fantasists, who your Tory MP is flirting with by the way!’ – and it helps the Lib Dems to avoid scrutiny of their own vague or ambiguous positions.  

It is, in short, easier to be all things to all voters if no one is putting you on the spot, in the spotlight. And Farage’s return ensures the spotlight is elsewhere. The Lib Dems won’t mind that – let Farage hog the airwaves while they work the doorsteps. Farage may be laughing on the TV screens and shaking up the polls, but on polling day, it could be Ed Davey who gets to laugh last and loudest.