By Ben Walker
Copyright newstatesman
Triple figures. That is the unspoken, fringe, daring dream of the Liberal Democrat activists as they head to their annual conference in Bournemouth this weekend. They’ll downplay it publicly, but it’s probable: the Lib Dems are staring at a haul of 100+ seats at the next general election.It may be the Con vs Ref and Ref vs Lab contests dominating political conversations at the moment. But there are some 100-plus Conservative and Lib Dem seats in which Labour polled third or below. In these, the government’s fluctuating popularity is not so relevant: what matters is the health of the Conservative Party.And that health, by all accounts, is rather poor indeed. Kemi Badenoch is polling dismally in the restless electorate and even worse in the shire seats her party could once take for granted. Recent county council elections have seen Reform snap up as much as half the Tory base.The appeal of Reform is, broadly, a traditional “up yours” to the so-called establishment. Appreciable, and I think we can all agree. But the Lib Dems can also make a reasonable claim to that mantle in certain, er, less student-heavy parts of the country. And where the two collide, uncertainty comes calling.In the face of the Reform onslaught, the Lib Dems have held onto their council seats better than Labour or the Conservatives. Yellow can see off turquoise in a way no other colour can right now.
The tea leaves from pollsters, modellers and by-election aficionados tell us this: crudely, the Lib Dems can sit pretty. Often, splits in the right wing vote allow Lib Dem candidates the win. And head-to-heads with the Tories look promising. Asked to choose between the Libs and the Cons, Reform voters go Tory, but Labour and Green voters all go Lib Dem. In Lib Dem-friendly Conservative seats, the Lib Dems have the advantage, the Cons the disadvantage.Furthermore, the Lib Dems can expect to benefit significantly from tactical voting. Their prospects are downplayed by current election projections which do not account for the phenomenon. Those polls predict that an election today would yield 286 seats for Reform, 145 for Labour, 59 for the Conservatives, 8 for the Greens and 81 for the Lib Dems. But the May results showed that British votes will still coalesce around a perceived “lesser of two evils”.When you do account for tactical voting, in a way similar to the one my Britain Predicts model employed in 2024, you get not 81 Lib Dem seats, but 101. Swathes of southern and western England. All of Wiltshire outside Swindon. Surrey and Berkshire and Bucks. Tory blue becomes exception, not rule.
Reform, meanwhile, instead of winning 286 seats, would maybe win 249.
Hefty qualification, though. We are still a long way from knowing how willing people are to vote tactically around Reform. They are the new kids on the block. And depending on where you live, the antipathy varies. That’s the real unknown in politics right now.What is known, however, is that the Lib Dems need only stand still for the next three years to profit from the decline and fall of Britain’s oldest party.
[See also: Who will be Labour’s next deputy leader?]
