Anticappointment is a concept coined by Toby Hadoke, a prominent Doctor Who commentator, to describe how Doctor Who fans approach a new series. They worry that they are not going to like it, even though they probably will. As a Liberal Democrat it fits well with how we approach elections.
Over forty years of disappointing election results has made me very cautious about predicting how many MPs we will end up with. I eventually decided to predict 32 MPs, pretty much our main target list. By the time polling day arrived, I knew that even though I was trying to limit my expectations, I’d be devastated if that was all we won.
But it wasn’t. We have 71 MPs. 71. SEVENTY ONE. By the time I’ve finished writing this, it could be 72. Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, in essence much of Charles Kennedy’s old seat, is recounting and I hear our folks our chipper.
Here’s Ed Davey exuberantly dad dancing and loads of Lib Dems singing Sweet Caroline. I always loved that song, but this has written it on my heart forever.
Sir Ed Davey celebrates to Sweet Caroline as he enters the @LibDems watch party in Central London. pic.twitter.com/JKIyyIE3Uj
— Jack Taylor (@Jack_P_Taylor) July 5, 2024
It’s a brilliant night for us. The best we have known in the history of our party by some margin.
Since Mary’s last update, we have added Chesham and Amersham to our list of technical gains. Sarah Green won it in a by-election in 2021, and few expected her to hang on to it. But she did. With a majority of around 5,500. We also held on to our other three by-election gains. Helen Morgan’s vote in North Shropshire practically had to be weighed as she romped to a 15,300 majority. Incredible to think that in 2019 and forever before this was a rock solid Tory seat. The one people were really worried about was Honiton and Sidmouth, the re-boundaried half of Tiverton and Honiton, won by Richard Foord in June 2o22. But Richard smashed it, beating Tory Simon Jupp by around 7000 votes. As an added bonus, the Tiverton part of the by-election seat was won by our Rachel Gilmour. Sarah Dyke also held onto Glastonbury and Somerton by 6,500 votes. The icing on that cake was Anna Sabine winning the other half of that by-election seat for us.
We also held on to all the MPs we won in 2017.
There’s always one result that breaks your heart, though. Poor Paul Follows had been widely anticipated to beat Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in Godalming and Ash. He just fell short by 800 votes.
I am thrilled beyond measure to see Vikki Slade finally elected in Mid Dorset and North Poole. After four attempts to win the seat, she made it, with a majority of just under 1400.
Jo Swinson’s old seat, now Mid Dunbartonshire, was won by Susan Murray, with a majority of almost 10,000. Wendy Chamberlain had a technical gain in her North East Fife seat with a majority which multiplied almost tenfold to 14000 and Jamie Stone gained Caithness with a majority which went from 200 to 10000. My time over the past 6 weeks has mostly been spent in Edinburgh West where Christine Jardine’s majority is almost as big as her actual vote when she first won in 2017.
Our new parliamentary party of 71 has 32 women. It’s better than we’ve had before in a big party, but not as good as we have had in the past.
This huge increase in our MPs will bring us in much more Short Money, the funds given to opposition parties to fund their work. We will get £21k per MP per year and £42.82 for every 200 votes. That’s way too many sums for me to work out when my brain is in its current exhausted state but it’s a darn sight more than we get at the moment.
Regaining the third party status at Westminster will give Ed two questions to the Prime Minister each week and much more media time.
But there are challenges ahead. The far right are still a problem and everyone who isnt them has to start challenging them properly and not caving to them like Labour has on issues like trans rights and immigration.
But that, too, is for thinking about after we’ve had time to enjoy this lovely moment.
And on top of all of that, who expected the Portillo Moment to be Liz Truss losing her seat? Just desserts for someone who has caused so much misery. I am sure Joe Lycett will be devastated by her loss.
I’ve finished writing and still no Inverness declaration. We’ll bring you that when we have it. I’m hearing that it could be as late as tomorrow before we finally hear.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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37 Comments
I have been a member of the LibDems and its predecessor, the Liberal Party continuously for 60 years. This is absolutely the best result in my lifetime with the added bonus that we didn’t lose a single seat and we retained all our by-election victors.
Inevitably, there were some near misses and once we’ve all caught up on lost sleep and stopped being perpetually anxious about the likely result, we do need to review the campaign to see what lessons can be learned. Reviews are vital, even when you do well.
Fingers crossed for Angus.
Good to hear how the Lib Dems will benefit financially. The targeting campaign, that l support, left most non-target local parties hollowed out with few members and £500 poorer by the loss of their deposits. So why shouldn’t the National party give a grant of £500 to these struggling parties to help them rebuild?
Does this result change our desire for Electoral reform?
If not we need to work with the Greens and Reform as electoral reform will not happen unless we have a wide coalition of the electorate, both left and right, progressive and traditionalist in favour of it.
We have seen in 2011 what happens when an electoral reform campaign is run as a purity test, solely by progressives and solely for fellow progressives.
Undoubtedly a great result and congratulations to those who devised and executed the targeting strategy. Surely though it is troubling that the party’s share of the popular vote has flatlined and if it is true, as Leekliberal suggests, that many local parties have been hollowed out, that is a poor basis for future gains. Like a hothoused plant we have plenty of flowers but shallow roots. Perhaps these are thoughts for another time.
It is a fantastic result and for the first time in a century the proprtion of seats won approximate to the vote share. However, Labour have taken two thirds of the seats with one thrd of the vote share and Starmer may (like Blair before him) be rather reluctant to consider proprtional representation, particularly with Reform taking the second highest vote share.
There is a lot of work to be done to promote Liberal Values and Liberal Democrat values in this Parliament, but a great Platform of MPs from which to do just that.
This result emphatically does not change our desire for electoral reform, indeed it strengthens it, as we can argue that we are not supporting merely for reasons of self-interest.
I first voted in a General Election in 1974, the Liberal Party polled twice the percentages we did yesterday, yet weended up with 14 seats.
For me there were several miletstones last night, in particular surpassing the 59 seats we won in 1929, and the 61 seats we won in 2005. When the exit polled said ’61 seats’ I thought that might be tad optimistic, so good to find that it was the opposite.
Started on a polling station in East Hants at 7am and ended at 9pm knocking up in Eastleigh, therefore very appreciative of Caron’s thoughtfulness in recognising the near misses amongst all the joys.
Why would it change our support for electoral reform? I think we all know that what FPTP gives, FPTP can take away. Look at what’s happened to the SNP, which if it had stopped supporting PR after its major gains a decade ago (it never did) it would be regretting that now. Also I suspect that even if the Tories had had a Canada 1993 type of result, they would still oppose PR, because they would still think of themselves as the alternative party of government (as the Canadian Tories did). Given that the Tories are likely to come back (even if in a different form), the Labour leadership’s continued support for FPTP seems remarkably short-sighted.
The reason our by-election winners got back is that they all have been first class MPs for their constituents. So congrats to Richard, Helen and Sarah.
I have analysed the results and there are 18 seats with the vote share at 50% or higher, which is good.
Worryingly, there are 19 seats with the vote share under 40%. Hopefully FPTP will be abolished before too long.
@Steve Comer: the Libs took 18% of the vote in 74. Last night 13%.
I know it’s probably a bit too soon to think about this sort of thing, but I would be interested to see which are our target seas for next time.
A truly great result mainly due to moderate Conservative voters switching to us right across swathes of the country not just in target areas in fact we did better in many seats that weren’t really targets! The rather distorted result should confirm our support for electoral reform but not pure PR.
Russell Johnston won the Inverness seat many years ago on a shade over 25% of the vote. The other 3 major party candidates got marginally under his vote.
Huge thanks to everyone who worked so hard for this & to the leadership team who stuck to the strategy of strict Targeting. In a few weeks we will be able to see if our Vote share responds to our success, I think Voters will be surprised by how well we did & more may Vote for us in response. Certainly we have killed the idea that we are a “Wasted Vote”.
Like Caron I was very happy to get 30. 70+ was beyond my wildest dreams, going to be 72 at the end judging from the local Inverness paper.
Whoever initiated the plan for the election, however long ago that was, he/she deserves a knighthood at the very least. Ed is now well prepared for the Post Office enquiry.
Now looking to the future we have of course left ourselves virtually bereft elsewhere. We need another piece of genius to get those areas going, especially with County elections coming up next May, another golden opportunity. Give it a couple of years and Reform will drift away.
Well done, very well done.
Congratulations to everyone who has been elected and thanks to all those who made those victories possible. Commiserations to those who just missed out and to those who stood with no expectation of winning, your efforts are appreciated. My particular praise to those in Torbay and particularly Steve Darling. who if I’m not mistaken is the first blind LibDem MP and the second if we count Henry Fawcett, from the 19th century. 31 women, going in the right direction, at least one with a visible disability, I wonder how many have invisible disabilities and a party-leader who knows what it is to be a carer. We have to keep up the work around diversity, but we are going in the right direction.
The fight around adult social care, the NHS and electoral reform goes on.
Further information on ISWR is that the recount is a technical one because the result doesn’t tally with the number of votes in the boxes. It will be carried out tomorrow. The SNP candidate won’t be there. The Inverness local paper says that LDS are claiming victory. My assumption is that the SNP won’t be there because they have lost and don’t think the recount will change the result.
Caron …..Any news on Inverness – can’t seem to find it anywhere at min ?
@Martin Gray
Re Inverness – BBC website is saying in news item ~ 17:25 – about reform’s 5th seat that:-
“This leaves just one seat yet to be confirmed, but a result in Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire is not expected until tomorrow over a vote “discrepancy’ delaying it.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd16410q7neo
The election campaign was a great success for the targeting strategy. Ed Davey also deserves credit – he came across as friendly, relaxed and relatable – a pleasant contrast to the tetchy and irritable Sunak, and the robotic Starmer. I do wonder how the party will position itself in the new parliament. It has leant heavily in recent years into being an anti-Conservative protest vote, but they will need to sing a new tune going forward. Their comfort zone would be to position themselves slightly to the left of Labour, as they did post 1997. However, that ground is a lot more crowded now – both the Greens and the Nationalists will be critics of Labour to their left, and the Lib Dems will need to think carefully how to define themselves, and what their target audience will be.
I hope the Lib Dems speak up for affordable housing in the south, where it is most needed.
There is comment in the Guardian and the Inverness local paper about this
Congrats to the winners overnight. But can you win today if you are not a target seat? That is what Paddy did in Yeovil in 1983 despite never being accepted by the Party establishment. Believe me it is true. But that is what Brian Mathew did yesterday. Brian fought the former seat of North Wilts in 15, 17 and 19 taking steady steps forward to victory but never with the aid of target seat status. So, the boundary commission cut his seat into three. Still he ploughed on. Contesting for the candidacy in the three successor seats. And never as a party insider. He lost the first two contests and still he ploughed on never receiving the invisible helping hands of the powers that be. Still he ploughed on eventually winning the nomination for Melksham and Devizes. When I spoke to him a few weeks ago he said, “still no aid and they’re telling us to send help here there and everywhere but M&D itself, but we are going to do a Paddy and be an insurgency.” I spent the day with Brian yesterday. What a team he had built. The exit poll put him down as a loser. Yet he won. And not close, a 2,500 vote majority. Well done Brian. He is a person steeped in International aid work. He’ll be a wonderful MP. The next step forward for the Party is for there to be a hundred insurgent Brians. Not a target seat? Just do it. Paddy did. Brian did. You can do it. Yes you can.
@Bill le Breton – and that is exactly what happened to Ed Davey when he was first elected in 1997. Kingston & Surbiton was not a target seat and we disobeyed orders from HQ to help in neighbouring constituencies, bringing home a stunning victory, comparable to those last night. Huge congratulations to Brian Mathew.
Would you or he like to write a proper post about it? – well probably you as he is going to be a bit busy.
It is now being widely reported that the SNP former MP for what is now Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire has conceded defeat and since his main challenger is Angus MacDonald, the Lib Dem candidate, it seems inevitable that he will be declared MP tomorrow. It is interesting that he was endorsed by Donald Kennedy in what was, as far as I know, his first political intervention.
I’m not a Lib Dem these days but in some ways it’s good to see – remembering the dark days of 2014-2019, when I was a member – hope returning and Lib Dems in post in such bizarre places as Witney and Maidenhead. At least its possible. (Although hoping the Tories will voluntary take a machine gun to their feet in all future governments and electoral contests is probably a bit optimistic).
Two seats I had my eye on were Exmouth and Windsor, where Lib Dems are ‘close third’ on near-equal votes to Labour, and not far off the Tory winner in both places. Julian Tisi in Windsor is a recurrent battler.
Steve, re electoral reform.
The best reason for supporting STV in multi-member seats isn’t so much that it provided better proportionality between party votes and seats (although of course it does) but because it gives ordinary voters a choice as to which MP to go to throughout the length of a parliament, not just one day every 5 years! I agree of course with everything else you say (and of course you may recall me being the original organising secretary of LAGER when we set it up in February 1974).
Thank you Mary for reminding us of Ed and your own experience when first getting Ed elected – another great instinctive campaign team.
This result is not because of targeting as swings were bigger outside of the high level target seats. It is more that a significant chunk of Conservative voters switched to the Lib Dems across the country (we also went backwards against Lab and Grn). This could be a one off or it could be a redrawing of the political map.
It’s an excellent set of results. The big question now is whether Britain enters a decade or more of centre-left government, or reacts to its failure by swinging sharply to the right, as we are now seeing across much of Europe?
Strategically, the party now needs the Labour government to succeed. Keep attacking the right, secure our gains, stay out of Labour’s way and pick off more good prospects; the remaining Tory seats where LibDems are now strong second place challengers.
If Labour becomes hated, all historical evidence is that voters will go straight back to the Tories, seeing Liberals as Labour-Lite. Our party never does well when a Labour government is unpopular. And if the Tories aren’t fit for purpose, voters will go for another right-wing alternative, which is of course Farage’s plan.
Britain’s electoral geography essentially puts the LibDems in the same bed as Labour, and the best long-term strategy for the party is to hang in there during two or three terms of Labour government, being a critical friend rather than outright opponent. We wait for Labour’s majority to erode and for their support for electoral reform to re-emerge.
The strategic mistake would be to focus all our fire on the new government, accelerating its downfall, when so many of our new MPs only got elected from a broad base of centre-left voters.
@ theakes
Why do you think Reform will drift away?
@Ian. It’s simply not true that LibDems don’t prosper under a Labour Government. In the mid seventies we did start to prosper under a Labour government, but that ended when we formed the LibLab pact. In 2005 we won 61 seats at the GE our previous best score much of it at the expense of Iraq war supporting Labour.
I will be very surprised if this Labour government delivers and since it is determined (or at least its leader is) not to contemplate even the single market, let alone the EU, its scope for growth will be severely limited. We will find ourselves increasingly on the left of this government.
What is now vital is to start building an organisation capable of fighting many more seats in winning campaigns. FPTP has bizarrely helped us win seats in 2024, an opportunity unlikely to repeat itself. [This the first time in my lifetime it has]. We need strong self supporting constituency organisations and this means finding new ways to recruit volunteers who will help us win next time round.
At last, this party has more-or-less recovered from the disaster that was Coalition. The campaign went far better than this ex-Lib Dem had expected. Ten out of ten on organisation, eight out of ten on policy. Ed Davey’s plans to haul the nation out of the mire weren’t perfect, but they did show a lot more energy and commitment to progressive change than Starmer did.
The Lib Dems defined and positioned themselves effectively in opposition to Tory government. Now they must position themselves by reference to a Labour government. That change will not be simple.
If Lib Dems let things drift, the political debate will soon be dominated by Tories castigating Labour for raising (or not cutting) taxes, and by Reform stirring the pot as small boats inexorably continue to land.
So the Lib Dems should quickly get onto the front foot. Press Labour to make faster progress on the NHS, social care, and sewage. Revive the “penny in the pound” campaign for significant, very necessary, but not excessive, tax rises.
I think you should take a clear position to the left of Starmer, albeit well to the right of Corbyn. Otherwise, you would risk becoming seen as Little Sir Echo to the Tories on the right. You would risk ceding progressive leadership to the Greens. You would also risk being drawn back towards a potential coalition of objectives with the non-racist wing of the Conservative Party. I trust you now all realise that that would be a disastrous way to go!
I agree with David and disagree with Mick.
There’s no evidence to support Mick’s assertions. The first big leap forward by the Liberals in 1974 after the rollercoaster of Heath’s Tory government. After the Wilson/Callaghan government, thrown out of office in 1979, voters flocked to the Tories and our vote share fell back. Progress in votes, if not many seats, was made during the Thatcher years, culminating in the big seat haul of 1997. 2010 at the tail end of the Labour government, didn’t deliver for us in terms of votes or seats, despite Clegg’s energetic campaign. This year’s big breakthrough came from Tory unpopularity rather than a surge in votes for us.
Mark my words, if our MPs play their part in bringing down this government, votes will flood back to the right and simply pass us by.
@Ian: our vote WAS up in 2010. Seats down.
@Chris Moore is correct. Our mistake in 2010 (and the 3 subsequent GEs) was to spread ourselves too thinly (carried away by Cleggmania). Our 2005 result — the only one in which we have ever won a significant haul of seats from Labour — shows that there is a route to electoral success with Labour in power. We held up against the Tories in that election as well (swings and roundabouts) showing that there is no inherent contradiction between winning against either of the two big parties.
With the Tories likely to pivot to the right in an attempt to compete with Reform, and Labour likely to appear not radical enough for many left-leaning voters, we could pull off a similar trick to 2005 if we target carefully.
We can be more radical than a governing Labour party, but crucially without any of the toxic ideological baggage of the hard left. Moreover, the former Tory voters who switched to us in the Blue Wall are hardly going to go back to a hard-right Reform-wannabe Tory party, much less to the Farage-led real deal. And we have no stake in parts of the country where the hard right-wing message appeals.
So please don’t ever say that we can’t win against an unpopular Labour government. We can, but it does help if the Tories are also unpopular.