The 2010 squeeze on resurgent Liberal Democrats tells a cautionary tale

Good morning. Following yesterday’s newsletter on the Conservative 2017 manifesto and the forewarning it offers for both parties, many of you were asking: “hang about: weren’t Theresa May’s policies a secondary issue to her own limitations as a candidate and campaigner?”

The honest answer is: I don’t know. What I will say is that when I was travelling the country talking to people during that election, I heard an awful lot from older voters about the “dementia tax”, and a lot less about May’s deficiencies.

Of course, the two things are linked: it was May’s decisions that led to that manifesto being put to the country, and May who could not defend it. You don’t get one without the other.

One reason why elections are hard to analyse is that they are multivariate events: so many things happen in them and there is a wide panoply of factors. Added to that, as Philip Cowley notes in his excellent regular series for The House, there aren’t many elections so we are often forced to draw broad lessons from a handful of data points.

It’s safe to say that both May’s shortcomings as a candidate and her manifesto made a difference, but harder to be clear on exactly what mattered most.

Nonetheless it is a good excuse to talk about another election that is on Westminster’s minds — the 2010 election, and specifically the Liberal Democrat factor.

All about that base

In 2010, the Conservatives went from one of their worst-ever defeats to securing Downing Street in a single night, but failed to win a majority:

The Liberal Democrats went into the 2010 election campaign fearing that they would be badly squeezed. There is no clear correlation between the number of votes received by the Lib Dems and those won by the Labour party. But when it comes to winning seats, the former tends to do well when the Labour party does well.

(David Laws, a former Lib Dem minister in the 2010-2015 coalition government, has a pet theory as to why this is, which I have gleefully ripped off as my own in the past. Broadly speaking, most voters intuit that the Lib Dems’ first choice for any coalition is the Labour party, so if the Labour party scares Conservative-Lib Dem considerers, that is bad for Lib Dem fortunes.)

The biggest Lib Dem struggle is convincing voters that the party is not a wasted vote. It also tends to be squeezed when the election outcome is uncertain.

Added to that, David Cameron had spent most of his leadership trying to appeal to socially and economically liberal voters, while Tony Blair, the face of the Iraq war, which had helped the Lib Dem party make gains against Labour, had been replaced by Gordon Brown.

All in all, this election gave the Lib Dems a lot to fear, but it was one in which they only lost five seats net in the end. The reason they didn’t do worse is pretty clear: the performances of Nick Clegg in the televised debates.

There are three useful lessons here: the first is that sometimes you can have almost everything go right and still do badly, electorally speaking.

The Lib Dems made bad resourcing decisions in some cases — such as Oxford West and Abingdon, a seat they really ought to have held. And they were let down by poor candidates in others — such as Montgomeryshire, previously one of their safest seats, lost in part because of Lembit Öpik, the incumbent MP, and his high-profile dalliance with one of the Cheeky Girls. That being said, the party did almost everything right. They had a charismatic leader — a Labour peer once told me they thought Clegg was the most charismatic leader the Liberals had had since David Lloyd George — they did well in the TV debates, and they surged in the polls. Nonetheless they got hit in the classic two-party squeeze.

They also benefited from the fact both Gordon Brown and David Cameron believed, rightly or wrongly, that it wasn’t in their interests to directly attack Clegg in the TV debates, hence the famous “I agree with Nick” soundbite. Another lesson, one more specific to the Lib Dems, is that any Lib Dem leader is always constrained by the fact they are the least influential part of a “three body problem”: the choices of their opposite number in the two major parties will always constrain them one way or another.

The third broad lesson is that what happens in election campaigns really does matter: without that huge pre-election effort, the Liberal Democrats would have done considerably worse.

Now try this

I saw The Origin of Evil, a perfectly passable flick starring Laure Calamy (out of Call My Agent). It’s an enjoyably dark comedy thriller but one I wish had been half an hour shorter. Still, it’s worth seeing if you’ve got a free evening and it is showing at your local cinema, but not one to add to the collection at home, I think.

Top stories today

• Mountain ahead | There are few silver linings for the Conservatives in the polling data, even among their traditional base. If Rishi Sunak defies the odds and his party recovers from its 20-point polling deficit within months, it would represent a comeback that has not been managed by any incumbent since 1970. How likely is it?

• Getting to the bottom of Thurrock | The government has rejected a request for a public inquiry into the bankruptcy of Thurrock council in Essex, forestalling a potential wider probe into systemic failures in oversight and funding of local authorities across England.

• Mortgage approvals at 17-month high | UK mortgage approvals beat expectations in February to hit their highest in 17 months, according to official data that reflects the fall in borrowing costs since the middle of last year.

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.

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.