The May 7 elections look set to cost Keir Starmer his job eventually, while perhaps a lack of both expectations and potential successors seems to have saved Kemi Badenoch, whose Conservatives had a similarly miserable night. But could it actually be Ed Davey whose parliamentary party has had enough of their leader?
The first serious rumblings are emerging among Liberal Democrats about where they are going under Davey’s leadership, less than two years after they won a historic 72 seats in the general election. Despite the election of 10 new MSPs (up from four) and 155 more councillors in England, Lib Dems moan they are piling up more votes in already strong areas while failing elsewhere.
Internally, Rats in a Sack hears that the Lib Dems were hopeful of taking control of both Merton and Southwark councils in South London, but the party ended up increasing numbers by only two and one councillors respectively. Meanwhile, relatively large resources – by Lib Dem standards – were poured into Birmingham, only for them to remain static there on eight seats.
Of 35 councils with seat gains, only three were in the north of England and two in the Midlands, leading to increasing rumblings that Davey is happy to be the party of disaffected Tories in the south. Many MPs are concerned their leader also has no strategy to take on Zack Polanski’s Greens, who are hoovering up votes in areas Lib Dems would once have fancied being the anti-Labour protest vote. And in Wales, where party leader Jane Dodds retained the party’s sole seat in the Senedd, she kept her distance from Davey throughout (the pair do not get on).
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Might Davey ‘do a Starmer’ and dispense with one or two of his closest aides who at present act as lightning conductors for the frustrations of the wider parliamentary party?
MPs and peers alike moan of the “Daveybunker” where key decisions are taken by a tiny group, most prominent of whom are two members of the House of Lords – Olly Grender, the party’s director of communications under Paddy Ashdown, and Rhiannon Leaman, until recently Davey’s chief of staff. One or both could soon be thrown overboard – on a bungee rope, naturally – to save Davey’s leadership.
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