Tag Archives: lib dem leadership

It was just gone 7am, and Boris Johnson couldn’t resist it. ‘Let’s get breakfast done!’ he said, to great laughs. And therein lies part of the secret to why he won a general election with an 80-seat majority – it was a corny line, but people could relate to the awful humour.

There’s a massive lesson for us in that as we choose our new leader. Being embedded in the world of politics, we so easily overlook just how little politics resonates with most people in this country, in fact one polling analyst said the public engages so little with politics that he had even heard some people asking whether Nigel Farage was the leader of the Liberal Democrats. And we forget that some people vote simply on whether they see a politician as a normal human being or not.

This is where Johnson scores. A normal human being he is most assuredly not, but he makes the same kind of bumbling mistakes we all make in our daily lives, and that makes him relatable. His slogan ‘Get Brexit done’ was so effective as to drown out the inherent mendacity of it. The lesson for us is that the next Lib Dem leader needs to be relatable on a human level and to keep it simple.

To those of us who are Lib Dem members, we may wish more for a social liberal or an economic liberal, we may want someone who reaches across the divide to other parties or is more tribal, who respects the liberal tradition more than the social democratic tradition, or vice versa, who is uncontaminated by the coalition or not. All this is fine in terms of satisfying ourselves, but if we want to cut through with the voters, we need a leader the public can see in a largely positive light, who says things in simple terms that we can all understand.