I have a massive amount of respect for Sir Ed Davey and the entire Liberal Democrat campaign teams. Last year, they took the party from the political wilderness in Westminster to a decisive victory, reclaiming Britain’s third party status. Unseating Conservative minister after Cabinet Member after party veteran, the party was seemingly unstoppable, with millions putting their faith in Davey and his pitch for grown-up politics to return once again. From 10pm on July 4th and over the following two days, it became clear: the Liberal Democrats were back.
Since then, much debate has arisen, particularly in recent months, as to whether these stunts should continue. Many were underwhelmed by Davey’s hobby horse offering at the Local Elections, and debate has continued in the intervening months. I thoroughly enjoy Davey’s stunts. I think they’re incredibly funny, personable and a great joy to watch. They were something different and special, and now everyone knows about Daredevil Davey. But they don’t work. And they never have.
Writing my postgraduate dissertation, I analysed hours of television coverage of the Liberal Democrat election campaign, from a variety of different mainstream media sources, as well as distributing a questionnaire showcasing some of the most memorable offerings and asking for direct feedback. Both methods showed broadly similar results.
It was clear that stunts are effective in helping to generate coverage, but only when a stunt is seen as exciting or entertaining. Whilst each of the stunts surveyed got over 70% coverage, the bungee jump for example was covered to a greater extent than the waterslide. However, once the stunts reached television, the results were less positive. Responses from figures in the media, and their guests, was mixed, with their proximity to the campaign and prominence as individuals being key; those on the ground with the campaign and with a lower individual profile reported more favourably than those detached from it or brought on in a commentator or opinion-providing capacity.
It was also clear that the stunts became the conversation, rather than the policies they were meant to highlight, and that whilst comparisons between the Liberal Democrats and other parties were to be expected, they were often weaponised. Stunts shown alongside images of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer meeting members of the public or discussing policy, & regular comparisons to figures such as Boris Johnson were made regularly – the stunts were effective at getting attention, but it was what was done with it that proved flawed.
Moving onto the reaction of the electorate, our sample was considerably more Left-leaning and politically-aware than the wider population, as well as being younger, more female-dominated and having a higher level of education. Mixed and inconsistent attitudes to the stunts were observed, particularly when they weren’t explained or attached with the policy they were supposed to be representing, and respondents indicated that the level of risk a stunt represented was positively correlated with positive reception. Even clearer than this though was the need for a simple message – the bungee jump was much more positively regarded than any of the other three stunts surveyed, and yet was the only one that pitched a message than a policy, and had the message conveyed during the stunt (“Vote Liberal Democrat”).
So what was concluded? There were three main takeaways that became apparent from analysing both media and public communications together: 1) Both the media and the public care about what stunt is portrayed, with impact & reception linked to this, 2) Neither the media nor the public are fully onboard or engaged with using stunts as a campaign tactic, and 3) the impact of Liberal Democrat policies is reduced by a tactic which ultimately overshadows policy and becomes the story, instead of facilitating it.
Our results in 2024 were phenomenal, there is no doubt about it. And Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat campaign team, candidates and everyone involved did a phenomenal job in securing the fantastic result. But since then, many have been unable to recognise the huge contribution that circumstance, tactical voting and anti-Conservative sentiment made to the outcome, and in some cases, substituting this for the stunt campaign.
Where do we go from here? Whilst the results show that the stunts did not necessarily achieve their aim in the way many believe, campaigning and communication overall needs to be significantly changed. As many within the party have pointed out, which has seemingly become our party’s sole high-profile campaign, the Liberal Democrats are almost entirely out of the mainstream media conversation, in favour of Reform. The party needs to capture attention, but not with stunts; the stakes are far too high now to be playing around.
* Sophie Layton is a party member and an International Public & Political Communications graduate at The University of Sheffield. She is the Managing Editor of WILD Magazine, Editor of Ed Fringe Review & former Arts & Theatre Editor at Forge Press, where she reported on the 2024 General Election. She has written for a number of other publications, including The Liberator, The Patchwork Foundation & UniHomes.
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35 Comments
So, if the stunts do not work, how do we catch attention?
“The impact of Liberal Democrat policies is reduced by a tactic which ultimately overshadows policy and becomes the story, instead of facilitating it.”
Yes, that’s clearly right. Well done the OP for doing a thorough piece of objective research instead of (as is all too common in politics) just going by flawed gut instinct.
The question is, what do the Lib Dems want to do about these findings?
Do the Lib Dems want to present themselves as a serious potential participant in government, ready to grapple with practical responses to the bond markets, to Trump, to broken Britain, to the far-right threat? If so, they’ll drop the stunt campaign.
Or do the Lib Dems want to present themselves as a sort of cuddly semi-political party, who shy away from the awkward decisions and just seek to pick up easy votes from mildly liberal voters? If so, then the stunt campaign should continue, because it accurately reflects that political perspective.
@ Nigel Hunter “So, if the stunts do not work, how do we catch attention ?” …….
By having spokespersons with charisma saying something relevant and persuasive in a convincing manner. Some people have it, Nigel. Unfortunately some people don’t.
On the general matter of stunts, Sophie is to be congratulated on her research . One must ask whether Party HQ and Lord Pack have ever considered commissioning similar research ? If not, why not ?
From a personal point of view I found the Marching Band thing somewhat desperate and embarrassing – a form of ‘Dad Dancing’. I can’t imagine my first Leader, Jo Grimond, ever doing it.
My question to Nigel is, do you agree that the main purpose of a Liberal Leader is to convince the electorate of the desirability of a Liberal Government and of their personal competence to run it ?
@Nigel Hunter I think as a party, the Liberal Democrats need to consider how it is they can make policies themselves stand out & newsworthy. If you were to look at media coverage in the past year, the two stand-out policies I believe people MAY remember are 1) Showing Premier League games for free & 2) That the BBC needs to be rebalanced – good policies, sure, but neither of them are speaking to the most prevalent concerns of the public right now. The problem with the stunts is that they catch attention but then fail to do much meaningful with that attention. I think the party needs to consider how we can better communicate our policies themselves, & a key part of that is simplifying our messages.
As I say in the research, the one stunt that proved disproportionately successful in communicating its message was the bungee jump – high octane, unexpected, with a simple message that was a direct call to action – ‘Vote Liberal Democrat’. LibDem policies, rightly, are complex & nuanced, as they always need to be, but I think the reason that parties such as Reform, & to an extent the Greens, are enjoying increasing popularity is because they can put forward simple messages to the electorate that are understandable. Whilst Reform’s policies in particular don’t go further than a simple (unworkable) message, they’re easy to articulate & therefore can easily cut through.
How many LibDem policies in any of the key policy areas can easily be summarised in a short phrase / single sentence? Both of the ones I named above can, which I think is part of the reason they’ve enjoyed such significant coverage, relative to the rest. Let’s be clear – I absolutely think the way our policies are written, decided, debated & actioned at the moment needs to be kept, but in a time where short-form content is key, attention spans are waning & people are fed up with politics, we’ve got to get better at keeping our messaging simple, & prevalent, & attaching people to said policies – we’ve got a significant (if uncovered) frontbench team now, we should be making more use of them.
In short – Keep it simple, refocus on the public’s key issues & send our people to be more visible & vocal. If our audience, or desired audience, are going short-form, we’ve got to be ready to adapt
When the stunts started each one was accompanied by a political message, which was sometimes mentioned in the media reports. As time has gone on, the media hardly ever reports the political message. The time has come to put the stunts to bed.
Perhaps the problem is that we are not now generating the messages to attach to the stunts.
A well researched article ,policy in its self is rarely eye catching , that it leads to a positive outcomes that has broad popular support within the electorate should be the target . You can only clown around for so long before it becomes predictable . We should remember we will be increasingly defending seats and wards we gained from a very unpopular government leading up to the next general election . What will matter is what we have done with our time ,have we made a difference ,has our style of governance delivered real change .
Our big problem in relation to the Media is that Our Values are in opposition to what makes things “News:.
We are about Long-term solutions to Long-term problems – News needs to be New. “We did that story last Week”
We are Anti-violence but News loves violence. A small riot will always get more coverage than a big peaceful demonstration.
We see complexity, the need to balance different needs. News loves simplicity.
The Stunts were a useful but temporary short-cut, we squeezed onto the News agenda under the “Talking Dog/Skateboarding Duck” category – Light Relief. It won’t work now because The News sellers have got bored.
Agree @Paul new strategies are needed for new times, but some of the 72 MPs we have now are likely to be there due to those stunts so let’s not completely throw the baby out with the bath water. With imaginative and eye catching graphics messaging can still be very punchy without verging on the embarrassing!
@ Sophie “we’ve got a significant (if uncovered) frontbench team now, we should be making more use of them.
In short – Keep it simple, refocus on the public’s key issues & send our people to be more visible & vocal.” As I said at conference Q&A on ReformUK, our MPs need to spend a little less time in Parliament and go round the country (at events outside local parties) telling people what we stand for in simple personal terms. I was disappointed with the panel’s response.
In addition, I think there is scope for better wording of policy motions. Simon Hughes said at conference the wording of the policy review motion was far too waffly. I say there was nothing in it to grab the attention of any journalist; maybe that is unfair about something was all about policy, but there was little else in the agenda papers that would grab any outsider’s attention. Ed made a good start in his speech, but much more needs to be done.
As to your point about simplicity, we must not be simplistic, so it takes much thought to produce sentences that adequately summarise what our policies are and what we are about. As someone famously said at the end of a very long letter, Sorry I didn’t have time to be brief.
Another suggestion for improving communication is to have very grabbing headlines, very short first statements and then follow these with more detail for those who want to read it. We have to make it easy for the media people to find something they can use.
@Sophie Layton
“I think the reason that parties such as Reform, & to an extent the Greens, are enjoying increasing popularity is because they can put forward simple messages to the electorate that are understandable.”
Not simple messages, simplistic messages. We are deprecating the intelligence of the voters if we believe that simplistic messages are the way forward. That is certainly true of Reform, we may also find it’s true of the Greens under their new leader.
The stunts boosted our coverage through GE24. It reminded voters we existed.
But it’s now same old, same old. Plus there are stunts and then there’s Ed riding a hobbyhorse, which made him look ridiculous. And I can’t remember the vaguely attached policy measure.
Ed, you’ve now got to change the tune: it’s got boring and predictable. Dimnishing marginal utility of returns.
I couldn’t disagree more with this. It’s the same old story that if we announce proper policy announcements, we’ll get coverage. We won’t. The bungee jump worked, because it had the message right, front and centre and it was memorable. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
Learn from Polanski.
“The truth is simple: Britain is not broken because of migration. Britain is broken because of inequality.”
Clear, concise, powerful, newsworthy.
I admire the effort by Sophie Layton and expect that our Party HQ team will read her dissertation with interest. I have downloaded it, but also drown in unread PDFs. They just accumulate.
What Sophie seems to ignore is the fact that our HQ team did very extensive research themselves to see how the stunts were being received by the electorate and the effect they were having overall on the success or failure of our campaign.
I myself have attended a number of briefings by our CEO Mike Dixon. From those it is clear to me that the stunts materially helped our campaign. The fact that Rory Stewart (to pick on one specific person) kept sneering at them is frankly irrelevant.
The article displays the over confidence of youth, since Sophie appears to conclude from her research that after the best Lib Dem result for 100 years, our central strategy team didn’t really know what they were doing.
@ Big Tall Tim: I was all in favour of the stunts in the GE. But now we need to find other ways to cut through. That doesn’t mean bland policy announcements; other better ways have to be found.
The occasional stunt works, but not a stream of increasingly desperate japes: Tim, I appeal to your wisdom and life experience: what did Ed on a hobby horse tell us about LD policy and intentions?
I think one of the best stunts, if that is what it was, was when the Tories arranged a photo-op in Henley backing on to the river, and the Lib Dems got wind of it. And an embarrassed Sunak was left looking sheepish as a heavily decorated Lib Dem boat sailed noisily past in the background, skippered by a beaming Daisy Cooper.
It still surprises me that nobody put together a film of all the best bits of that campaign, starting with Sunak forgetting his brolly and ending with Truss forgetting her manners. The way in which the wheels serially came off the Tory campaign was a continual delight.
I found Zac of the greens had a lot to learn from.
Ed can’t come across so well – can’t show so much “belief “.
As alluded to above think graphic stunts could be good – eg mega life size 3-D bar charts showing increase in sewage pollution in rivers since Brexit or fall in exports by small businesses since Brexit or loss of wildlige/habitat year on year over past 50 years or decrease in life expectancy etc. Visuals can be much more powerful than words. Ed Conway on Sky does this and his graphics do gain traction eg increase in ‘Farage’ boats since Brexit.
With great respect, those voting lib dem do not generally want a failed labour party propped up after the next general election. Labour are neither progressive or social democratic and starmer has been a very poor Prime Minister.
@Sophie Layton
This comment is to apologise for the tone of some of what I wrote in my comment at 18:42 yesterday. It was wrong of me.
I was exhausted after two days of intense activity in my role of Co-Chair of the Muslim Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester following the horrific Manchester synagogue attack. I only realised today how crabby I was when writing my comment, but there is no excuse for some of its tone.
I do recommend meeting up with Mike Dixon to discuss how your findings compare with the real-time research that HQ was doing on stunts during last year’s campaign.
Since the Greens elected a new leader their support has fallen, sometimes considerably, in most of the local byelections they contested.
Although their numbers have risen from 60,000 to over 83,000 only 25,000 voted in the election for the new leader.
Zack Polanski is basically doing a Nigel Farage but on the left: Making dramatic headlines with simplistic black-and-white statements that might superficially appeal to the fed-up/ feeling-disenfranchised/”they’re-all-the-same” voter, but which offer no hope of a realistic programme for Government. While he may offer some lessons in how to get attention, I very much hope we don’t try to emulate him.
In fact I think Zack is inadvertently creating an opening for us: If he carries on the way he has been, the Greens are likely to lose the support of just about every moderate voter who voted for them out of concern for the environment. The LibDems would be an obvious new home for those voters – IF we’re willing to step up and start calling Zack out for the extremism that he seems to be offering.
There’s only one stunt that really made my toes curl, and that was the cheesy flag waving at the conference rally. Is there a shred of evidence it did us any good?
There have been 16 general elections in my lifetime and in none of them have we had so much coverage as in 2024. As a PhD I understand the value of research, but will those unhappy about stunts please put forward a real alternative. We used to put up charismatic speakers to promote us and got no publicity at all. The media are simply not interested in worthy policy, but often go for the novel approach.
Hello Mick, I agree with you that the GE 2024 campaign was the best in my lifetime. Stunts were part of that.
Others were 1. Ed’s effort beforehand to go round the country and find out what issues were important to voters. An extroverted approach, rather than looking inward and campaigning on issues that float the boat of LD activists: i.e. the perennial PR and Europe focus, whihc appeals to only a tiny percentage of the electorate. Improving care and health returned us to our ideological roots of improving positive liberty for those marginalised bythose two issues.
2. Ed’s use of his own life story to highlight the importance of carers and caring.
The stunts have become boring and a distraction: there are too many and some make him look like a fool. The hobby horse stunt was utterly embarrassing. As was challenging Keir Starmer to a dance-off.
Well-judged photo opps involving interacction with local voters or activists: great. Crass and pointless stunts: no thanks.
As to what we can do to cut through: we are getting good coverage in local media where we have MPs. Our MPs need to raise their game at national level and be available for interviews. Could I politely suggest that they need to be more insistent about getting on to national media: and have something interesting to pique editors’ interest.
At best this is research into the 2024 campaign which – like most election campaigns – is to a large degree sui generis a reflective of the context of the time. Going in to 2024 the Lib Dems were essentially an irrelevant force so AIUI the main focus was on very local ground based campaigns about ‘electing a local champion’ – a phrase Ed used numerous times and really about those seats where the party was second.
The stunts were part of the air war which could have damaged those ground based campaigns but probably didn’t do much to enhance them. I’ve organised several leaders visits in GE campaigns and not sure they added much and possibly a net negative if you measure in activist time and energy they consumed.
What is certain is that the 2028-9 GE will be a completely different animal and the Lib Dems standing completely different which neds different tactics.
I think those who argue that the stunts were / are irrelevant have forgotten just how invisible we were (ignored by the media) before GE2024. Indeed, still are.
In many respects, the point of the stunts was just to get noticed / mentioned, not even raising the policy theme of the day; that was a bonus. Why? Because simply being reminded that we exist is enough to get many people to vote for us.
Judy Abel says “Visuals can be much more powerful than words”. I would say are ALWAYS more powerful than words. TV is a visual medium not a words medium, and if the visual moves, so much the better.
Our ground campaign is about delivering a powerful, local (thus relevant) message.
Stunts and well-known personalities attract attention.
1. Land-mines. Issue was raised by David Alton and ignored. Diana, Princess of Wales, had a media scrum.
2. Gurkha rights. Issue was raised by a Lib Dem PPC (Peter Carroll?) and ignored. Joanna Lumley had a media scrum.
3. 2008 recession. Vince Cable warned about the economy and was ignored.
Nigel Farage is a stunt and a well-known personality.
The stunts proved effective in the 2024 GE campaign in capturing media attention for the party, however much some bien pensants in the national media looked down their noses at them. I do worry that Ed Davey is now a little like an obscure pop artist, who has had a surprise hit with a novelty song, and is then condemned to repeat it, with minor variations, and diminishing returns, for ever more. I see Mark Pack is making the argument that the stunts do not put off potential LD voters, based on recent polling. However, I suspect that it is a hidden factor amongst those who dismiss the LDs as not being a serious contender for government. I feel that Sir Ed needs to play a different tune at the next GE (and no, that doesn’t mean taking up the bagpipes).
It is not the case that we got more coverage in 2024 than any previous modern general election. We received fairly equal coverage with the Tories and Labour in both 1983 and 2010 because we were regarded (wrongly as it happened) as contenders for government. The stunts were effective but they have now to stop. We have to pump out on a daily basis simple Liberal messages on the cost of living, fuel poverty, climate change and civil liberties .
Thank you Sophie for this research. I’m not surprised while disappointed that various male commentators have reacted so patronisingly. The idea that because we won 70 seats the stunts must have worked is an example of how poor our education system is – we don’t seem to educate people about the difference between correlation and causation anymore. If Reform hadn’t split the Tory vote we would not have got so many seats including in my own constituency. The numbers show this quite clearly. We forget that at our electoral peril!
Alison,
I must admit to being very surprised by your comment “I’m not surprised while disappointed that various male commentators have reacted so patronisingly”. Having looked at all of the comments, the vast majority are in agreement with Sophie and any discourse is usually centred around offering a slightly different slant to some aspect of the whole picture, in no way a putdown like ‘we don’t seem to educate people about the difference between correlation and causation anymore’. I think we can say that everyone here is aware of that, even though we may forget it in our enthusiasm to celebrate our successes.
Overall, I can see at most three comments which came anywhere close to your description and indeed of those the one by Mohammed Amin was shortly followed by a fulsome apology, something that actually makes me think more favourably of him, because hardly ever do you find anyone involved in politics, male or female, admit they got anything wrong ever.
What I would say in addition is that almost every comment here has engaged directly with the points made in Sophie’s article and offered support or proposed an area for consideration and possible improvement. To my mind in no way is this male commentators reacting patronisingly.
I personally think you have totally misjudged the tone of responses here.
Do you really believe it is patronising and if so could you explain it so we men can understand why?
Regards,
David