It is warm Monday afternoon in the final week of the UK election campaign and Roz Savage, Liberal Democrats candidate for South Cotswolds, sits on a stool by a lakeside swinging her bare feet. We are in Gloucestershire countryside, a 20-minute drive from Swindon.
Savage awaits the arrival of Ed Davey, her party leader. She has dressed appropriately. Not in a formal skirt or blouse, but in a wetsuit. Davey, an Oxford-educated knight of the realm, has morphed into the jovial stunt king of British politics. While the Labour and Tory leaders have spent the campaign visiting nondescript warehouses, he has been diving into rivers and doing bungee jumps.
Davey’s gleeful antics have sliced through the media fog and the Lib Dems are on the verge of reclaiming their spot as third-largest party in parliament. Polls suggest the party could win 60 or 70 seats on Thursday. It won 11 in 2019.
Many of its target seats are in traditional Tory areas in the affluent south of England – the home counties and the “west country” where the Lib Dems have shown they can beat the Conservatives in local and byelections.
For desperate Tories the Lib Dem assault is one limb of a tripartite pincer grip crushing its vote, with Labour advancing in urban areas and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK peeling off support everywhere.
[ In pictures: Ed Davey's photo stuntsOpens in new window ]
Savage is explaining the issues in South Cotswolds – a new constituency straddling Gloucestershire and Wiltshire where housing worries young couples and the National Health Service concerns older voters – when the Davey circus rolls in.
The Lib Dems’ battle bus, Yellowhammer One, pulls into the car park of the lakeside resort. A gaggle of earnest young party staffers disembark followed by their grinning leader. He changes out of his formal attire and they congregate at the waterside.
“Another day, another wetsuit,” says Savage to her leader. Watersports are old hat to her. Savage was the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. She later campaigned against marine pollution. She is in a tight race in South Cotswolds with incumbent Tory, James Gray.
“Did you enjoy your bungee?” she asks Davey. That morning, he had thrown himself off a crane in Eastbourne in Sussex. He arches his eyebrows in silence.
“What are we doing,” he says faintly, as a watersports assistant ties two inflatable rings containing him and Savage to a speedboat. It zooms up the lake with the two Lib Dem politicians trailing behind in the whitewash, bouncing around like dolls. Savage’s screams fills the Cotswolds air.
“We take the concerns of voters very seriously, but we don’t need to take ourselves too seriously,” Davey later tells The Irish Times, back on the safety of dry land.
“We get more debate about Lib Dem policies because of the stunts than when we sat at lecterns doing press conferences. When I fell off a paddle-board at Lake Windermere [early in the campaign] and later spoke about sewage, people were talking about our sewage policy and the scandal [over pollution of rivers],” he says.
“When I came down a water slide in Somerset at half term, lots of kids around, we spoke about mental health. Literally as I came down the slide, the BBC were talking on air about our mental health policy, which is to ask social media giants to pay more in tax so we can put a mental health professional in every school.”
Whereas prime minister Rishi Sunak and, to a lesser degree, Labour’s Keir Starmer are both stilted when talking about family life, Davey has given several emotionally-charged interviews about his role as a carer. His father died when he was four. Eleven years later, he helped nurse his dying mother as she succumbed to cancer. Davey used to inject her with painkillers after school. Now, along with his wife Emily Gasson, he is a carer to their teenage son John, who has profound physical and mental disabilities. Does opening about it come naturally?
“No,” he says quickly. “Before I became party leader I never talked about my roles as carer. Then you get reasonable questions from [journalists]. You have to decide: what are you prepared to tell and what are you not prepared to go into.”
Davey says his carer role has helped to inform Lib Dem policy on the NHS. “It has been my life experience. I get it.”
Apart from the Scottish National Party, the Lib Dems are the only anti-Brexit party left in Westminster politics. Davey is cautious about it, as he doesn’t want to frighten off Tory voters. But he says Britain should begin getting closer to the European Union again, starting with a trade deal that stops just short of rejoining the single market.
“That would be a good first step,” he says, recalling how he worked well with former Irish ministers such as Pat Rabbitte when both were in government years ago.
If the Tory party has a truly calamitous night on Thursday, some speculate that the Lib Dems could challenge its position as the second largest bloc after Labour. Unlikely as it seems, that would represent Davey’s greatest stunt of all.
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