LONDON — The Liberal Democrats have already selected a raft of prospective parliamentary candidates in their target seats for Britain’s next general election, as part of a wider move to ready the centrist party for a potential return to government.
Over the past month, Britain’s pro-EU liberal party quietly picked 28 candidates and built three-person activist teams around each of them. It’s a move that lays the groundwork for the next election — not currently due until 2029 — and marks the earliest in a cycle that the country’s third-largest party has ever picked candidates.
POLITICO spoke to 12 Lib Dem politicians and staff with direct knowledge of the changes, some granted anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s next phase and its stakes.
“We’ve got the next general election in our sights,” said MP Lisa Smart, the Lib Dem’s Cabinet Office spokesperson, a brief focused on the party’s plans for government.
The question now, she said, is: “Are we match fit? Are we ready?”
Getting offensive
The change to speed up candidate selection was only made possible after activists at the Lib Dems’ autumn and spring conferences backed a sweeping overhaul of the party’s previously volunteer-run, decentralized process. Internal critics had warned that this set-up left the party picking candidates dangerously late in the day.
At the same time, the party has restructured its press operation, tripling its digital media team to nine — including TikTok food influencer Owen Reeman, whose “random takeaway” reviews have earned him more followers than any party account in the U.K.
The Lib Dems are meanwhile building out the operation around leader Ed Davey, appointing Ruth Younger as his new chief of staff and creating a first-ever post of director of political strategy, filled by James Holt — a former party staffer who once worked for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
One party official said the changes are part of a shift into “a more offensive strategy” designed to prepare the Lib Dems for the next election. The Lib Dems last tasted power as junior partners of Britain’s 2010-15 coalition government, and now spy a path back to power through the U.K.’s fractured five-party politics.
The Lib Dems bagged a record 72 MPs at the 2024 general election — but have since faced grumbling from some MPs and activists as smaller outfits like Reform UK and the Green Party overtake them in the polls.
One senior Liberal Democrat MP complained that the party had grown “self-satisfied” about breaking its own records — instead of setting a “cohesive vision for the country” to take on a faltering Labour, while allowing Reform and the Greens to seize the headlines.
Smart, one of more than 60 new Lib Dem MPs elected in 2024, defends the strategy, saying the party has quietly consolidated its base.
In May, the Lib Dems overtook the Conservatives to control the second-largest number of councils in the U.K. and the party increased its total numbers of councillors for an eighth straight year.
The party has now turned its 72 parliamentary seats — seen by many as a potential ceiling on Lib Dem success — into “fortresses,” Smart claims, made so secure that they can be used as bases for the party’s machinery to branch out into new areas.
Brace for the wetsuit
The expanded digital unit — the party’s largest ever — will also help in this battle. Party insiders say the changes are designed to seize more of the so-called “air war” and drive media debate through the social media feeds that increasingly shape what broadcasters choose to put on air.
It will also help MPs produce their own online content and bypass a national press they feel has ignored them.
There is an unspoken upside, too. A louder air war means a campaign less dependent on the foot soldiers of the ground war at a time when Lib Dem membership has almost halved. Party officials confirmed to POLITICO numbers remain at around 60,000 as reported by the BBC last year — down from just under 118,000 in 2020, after Davey took over as leader.
As the party gets serious, many are also privately hoping the next phase will mean a move away from Davey’s “buffoonery,” as a second senior MP puts it.
To some, Davey’s love of campaigning photo opportunities — bungee-jumping, or riding a hobby horse — has run its course and is holding the party back from being seen as a serious party of government.
“We need less of Davey the clown, and more of Davey the serious economic thinker,” the first MP says, referring to the leader’s previous life as an author of economic pamphlets and a Cabinet minister in the coalition government.
They are in for some bad news.
The party’s leadership insists the stunts are here to stay.
They argue the visual metaphors cut through and allow the party to discuss serious topics like sewage being pumped into the U.K.’s waterways — the theme behind a stunt that saw Davey repeatedly tumble off a paddleboard on Windermere, footage of which ran on news bulletins and front pages across the U.K.
Party officials say they are also behind Davey’s healthy approval ratings: he consistently records the best net favorability of any party leader — albeit with a score that remains negative.
“Ed’s done it better than any other political party — probably in the world,” says a second senior party official, arguing rivals from Tory chief Kemi Badenoch to Reform boss Nigel Farage are now copying the Lib Dem playbook.
“You have seen Kemi Badenoch scrubbing graffiti and posing on a tanker,” the official adds. “Meanwhile, Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick are paying for petrol on forecourts.”
“I think they’ve moved towards us on visuals, not away from us,” they add.
The first official says the stunts have entered “a slightly different phase” and may fade for the rest of this Parliament.
But former Lib Dem president Lord Pack warned that they will be back as the election nears: “I have no doubt we will, at some point, see Ed in his wetsuit again.”
Kingmaker role
The party is retooling its election machine as voting intention fractures across five parties and a hung parliament looks more likely.
If the Lib Dems keep their MPs, or even make modest gains, the former junior coalition partner could find itself kingmaker again.
As psephologist Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester, puts it: “Lyndon Johnson’s first rule of politics is to learn how to count — and in a hung parliament, 72 MPs is a lot.”
Despite losing ground to insurgent parties, the Lib Dem leadership speaks, both privately and publicly, of returning the party to government.
“We’d be stupid not to be thinking about the possibility that we could play a decisive role in a hung parliament,” says Bobby Dean, the Lib Dem’s House of Commons spokesperson.
Davey has told his MPs the Lib Dems are “a party of power,” the first senior figure quoted above says. “We want to be in government and change the country.”
Smart admits as much. “Any political party is aiming to be a party of government — that’s what we’re in it for,” she says. “You change things in government far more easily than you do in opposition.”
On a recent episode of the podcast Political Currency, Davey refused to “even address the question” of a future coalition partner — arguing with ex-Labour MP Ed Balls that history shows Lib Dem leaders who fixate on life after polling day often post the worst results.
While Davey did not give examples, the words of former Liberal leader David Steel were probably not far from his mind. In 1981, Steel told activists to “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government” in the wake of a high-profile alliance with the newly formed SDP. In 1983, the parties won a disappointing combined 23 seats as Margaret Thatcher’s Tories swept to a second landslide.
But red lines do exist, and they all point in one direction. Davey told the party’s spring conference Lib Dems had a “moral responsibility” to stop Reform. And privately, party figures concede they would not enter a coalition with Nigel Farage’s party under any circumstances.
That is partly conviction and partly cold electoral arithmetic. Ford’s polling suggests the party’s own supporters would not wear it: “You could fill Wembley Stadium with Lib Dem voters,” he says, “and not find one who’d back going in with Reform.”
As Dean points out, a coalition with the Conservatives could be hard, after they ran their last general election campaign “an anti-Conservative force.”
This is a point backed up by Ford, who argues the Lib Dems have become the “not-right vote” in many parts of the country — the refuge for southern voters who want to block the Tories or Reform — which makes another Conservative coalition electorally-toxic.
A second pact with the Conservatives is “unthinkable” to Lib Dem members, the second Lib Dem MP tells POLITICO, after the party nearly went extinct at the end of its previous coalition, losing 49 of its 57 seats in 2015.
That leaves Labour as the most likely partner — and behind the scenes, insiders agree that is the direction of travel.
“The Lib Dems will, in all likelihood, be the largest available progressive partner for Labour in any hung parliament,” Ford argues, because for a pro-European party of the center-left, Labour is the only realistic fit.
Playing “Greece to Labour’s Rome” — the policy-focused brains trust — “plays a lot to the erogenous zones of their activists,” Ford adds.
Whatever the future holds, the Lib Dems clearly want to be ready for it. The party has spent the past month tuning its campaign machine for a contest that could still be years away.
“We are genuinely impatient to get more power for the Lib Dems,” Smart says.