Liberal Democrats target 3 types of seats

Good morning. Many of you have asked: “What is the Liberal Democrat strategy in this general election?”

The short answer is that most of the Lib Dems’ strategic choices at the UK’s looming general election were made for them in the 2019 election. After that election, essentially all of the Lib Dems’ viable target seats have been held by Conservative MPs.

The party has just one plausible target that is held by the Labour party: Nick Clegg’s old seat of Sheffield Hallam. Even there, the party’s best route to winning it back lies through squeezing the substantial Conservative vote in third place.

So even before Ed Davey was elected leader, his party’s strategy had been set in many ways. But there are many debates about how to execute that strategy. For today, some thoughts on the three types of constituencies that Davey is targeting.

Lions and Lamb

The most important thing to understand about Ed Davey’s leadership is he is, quite deliberately, not particularly interested in what gains the Lib Dems make in the opinion polls. He is interested in winning seats in a relatively narrow band of constituencies.

To do that, he has to do three things: convince voters first that the Lib Dems can win in these seats, second that Labour can’t win in those constituencies and third that the Lib Dems should win.

Broadly speaking, the Lib Dems are targeting three types of seat at the next election. First on the list: constituencies that they have held before, but now have a Conservative MP and that voted to leave the EU in 2016. These include places such as North Norfolk. Many in the Lib Dem party believed that seat was permanently lost owing to the huge importance of the personal vote of the then MP Norman Lamb. But now they believe they have a fighting chance. The same goes for other, classic Conservative-Lib Dem marginals such as Eastbourne.

These are seats where it is frankly much easier for the Lib Dems to convince voters that they are the lever to pull to defeat the Conservatives, because they have already done so in the past. This is why Lib Dem by-election victories can be so valuable: places such as Eastbourne, now a perennial Conservative-Lib Dem marginal, first went Liberal Democrat in a by-election back in 1990.

The second group are constituencies that have never voted Lib Dem before but did vote to remain in the EU. These constituencies comprise rich graduates, liberal commuters and other voters that were once the electoral shock troops of the Tory party but who are now drifting away. These constituencies are places such as Wokingham, Bicester and Woodstock, and South Cambridgeshire. These are seats where people tend to quite like the idea of the Lib Dems but where the party has never clinched victory.

These are the places where there are many voters who think the Lib Dems should win. However, convincing them that they can is harder. That’s why local election victories are so important to Lib Dem prospects.

Then there is the third group — places that the Lib Dems have both won before and which have many voters who are naturally aligned with the party’s platform in terms of their view on politics, policy and society as a whole. Constituencies such as Winchester, Cheltenham and Lewes.

It’s the question of how to tilt the party, and what its leader should be doing or saying to win votes, that divides opinion within the Lib Dems. I’ll have some more thoughts on that later this week.

Now try this

This weekend, I have mostly been listening to Philip Glass’s marvellous soundtrack from Tales from the Loop, reworked for solo piano. I haven’t seen the television show that inspired the music. With the exception of Fleishman is in Trouble, which had a wonderful score by Caroline Shaw, I have a terrible record whenever I watch a TV show specifically for its composer. Still I find myself listening to it and thinking it’s worth a go, at least.

Top stories today

• Compensation bill in infected blood scandal could be as high as £10bn | Jeremy Hunt is expected to unveil a multibillion-pound compensation package for victims of the UK’s contaminated blood scandal, in an attempt to bring closure to families who have waited more than half a century for redress. 

• Fraud refund plan | The UK’s City minister has criticised plans to force banks and payment companies to reimburse fraud victims up to £415,000 from October, in the latest sign of growing tensions between the Treasury and regulators.

• Border folly | A UK government programme to build a post-Brexit trade border has been hit by delays and computer glitches that will push up the project’s costs to at least £4.7bn, the National Audit Office has found.

• Labour mulling ‘simplifying’ GRC process | Labour will make it easier to change gender and is considering allowing a single family doctor to sign off on the decision under plans to “simplify” the process, the Times’s Geraldine Scott reports.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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