The most infantilising election of all It's time to make politics serious again

How do you feel about that most English of vices: gentle whimsy? Personally, I can’t abide unusually shaped teapots, cat cartoons, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, London Marathon costumes, or jokey books you’re supposed to read on the toilet. For the same reason, I was probably never going to be the ideal recipient of Sir Ed Davey’s electoral campaign — now thankfully concluded. Still: as the sun sets on a Tory government, and Davey shakily regains his land legs after six weeks of plummeting through the air and being catapulted into cold water, it’s worth considering what precedent his extremely strange, babyish campaign set for British politics, and how we might avert its repetition in future.

In the run up to the election, the papers mostly gave Davey an easy ride (as it were), seemingly unwilling to be scathing about what might yet turn out to be the inspired manoeuvres of an emerging national treasure. International media outlets didn’t help, seizing the opportunity to resurrect one of their favourite national stereotypes, the loveable British eccentric. And another factor enabling the horror to hide in plain sight was the general level of cringeworthy memification throughout the campaign, with Dawn Butler rapping, Jeremy Corbyn pretending he knows how to wash a car (or indeed what a car is), and Nigel Farage garnering 8.5 million TikTok views while doing an Eminem impression. Viewed in passing, the Lib Dem approach just looked like more of the same, but in fact it was much worse.

Of course, politics has long included gimmicks from MPs hoping to make a splash: who could forget David Cameron being pulled along by Norwegian huskies in 2006, or the much-derided “Edstone” in 2015? And then there was the biggest and most cunning stunt of all during the  2012 London Olympics:  the ne plus ultra of making a self-referential tit of yourself, apparently endearing Boris Johnson to a large part of the public for a generation, and followed up by various daft photo opportunities when he was running for national office. But even those ridiculous exploits were as nothing to the single-minded intensity of the Davey project, which saw him pratfalling in various locations around the country for a full six weeks: not so much offering lots of speeches punctuated by the odd bit of shenanigans, as 90% shenanigans interspersed with occasional bits of chat and weeping to camera about his dead parents.

Some of the appearances were justified by party masterminds as being vaguely connected to a particular policy objective — though, rather like their leader’s Zumba dancing, the explanations given were often a bit of an awkward stretch. Bungee-jumping in Eastbourne was supposed to tempt people into trying something heartstoppingly terrifying for the very first time: namely, voting Liberal Democrat, which seemed to be saying the quiet part out loud. Repeatedly falling from a surfboard into the Cornish foam was allegedly done in order to highlight the problem of sewage in our seas, though the degree of enthusiasm Davey conveyed for the experience tended to suggest exactly the opposite. Careering down a waterslide was about improving mental health for young people — yet it remained unclear how incipient adolescent anxiety would be improved by the sight of a 58-year old political leader perched precariously on a rubber ring, gurning ecstatically like a giant toddler as he hurtled down the slope.

Another explanation for Davey’s behaviour resembled the sort of justification sometimes offered by Just Stop Oil activists or, for that matter, school shooters: namely, it was the only way to get media attention for their cause, otherwise known at Lib Dem HQ as winning the “air war”.  This defence would perhaps have worked better had more people been able to work out what the cause was supposed to be, exactly. And in fact — like Farage’s memes on behalf of Reform — the main point of the appearances seemed to be to convey something about the leader in particular, and nothing very specific about his party and their policies at all.

Yet even here, the level of information offered was remedial. We mostly learnt that Davey doesn’t take himself too seriously: “I’m quite happy to have some fun,” he declared, shortly after skidding downhill in Wales on a bike with legs cartoonishly akimbo, just in case anyone had missed the point. Equally, we discovered that behind the smile lies heartache, with several affecting personal tragedies in his past. In a video, interviews, and press releases, Davey saw Starmer’s touching tale of a disabled mother and raised him  two dead parents at a young age, a dead Nanna, and a disabled son for whom he has significant caring responsibilities. So heavily was the latter mined for relevance to a manifesto pledge to increase the Carer’s Allowance, it sometimes seemed as if the policy had been designed around Davey personally.

It’s hard to be rude about someone whose public persona is so guileless: an enthusiastic, kindly, hammy Church of England type, as written by Richard Curtis on a good day and Armando Iannucci on a bad one. But politics isn’t care work nor is it a sitcom. The fact remains that despite some of the positive headlines it attracted, Davey’s CBeebies-style campaign indicated a staggeringly infantilising attitude towards the electorate. It seemed clear that either senior members in the Lib Dems are childish morons, or that they believe that voters are.

Perhaps it was assumed that by minimising the use of words altogether in their campaign material, they could maximise voter appeal while avoiding gaffes and the spectre of future broken promises. Political slogans already tend to be vacant and indecipherable anyway, allowing hearers to project whatever they want into the void. Labour’s key message argued gnomically for “Change”, while the Conservatives went with “Clear Plan. Bold Action. Secure Future” — though it was a testimony to their history of incompetence that even this vague statement of intent seemed patently unachievable.

Yet there are also signs that Lib Dem strategists assumed that Davey’s clowning would be of interest to middle-class former Tory strongholds in particular, stuffed as they are presumably thought to be with soft-hearted, financially insulated types, low on political analysis but big on heartwarming feels. This seems indicated by what they called the “Gail’s strategy” — targeting wealthy Southern towns with a Gail’s bakery in the vicinity for a bit of the Davey magic, anticipating these as the places with the biggest chance of shifting disgruntled voters towards Liberal Democrats. One might question the sagacity of this plan on a number of levels: not least because what makes a sourdough-lover from Chichester smile ruefully or wipe away an empathic tear is likely to grate heavily upon a sausage roll-lover from Bolton. But there’s also the fact that even in the most insufferably smug of Southern enclaves, chock full of Dryrobe-wearing wankers nursing spelt loaves and worrying about property development in their area, most voters are just not that stupid.

The most likely explanation of any Lib Dem victories emerging today is that people were utterly fed up with the Tories, not that their heads were positively turned by the sight of G-forces acting on the face of an otherwise rather dull man on a rollercoaster. If anything, for all we know, the inanity of the campaign might have worked against the party: even among the positive press coverage, there were signs of ambivalence in onlookers. Meanwhile, there is also evidence that younger voters found the use of electoral memes patronising and off-putting generally. It would be good if pollsters would make an attempt to confirm these hypotheses now, for fear that correlation is lazily taken to indicate causation and we are subjected to even more fatuous levels of japery in five years’ time.

Satisfying as it may be on some atavistic level, I don’t want to see political figures shot into the air, toppling into water, or bouncing around on giant inflatables; I’d rather just hear them talk about what they intend to do and how they will do it. In a supposedly democratic society, it doesn’t seem a lot to ask. There’s a lot of work to do in the next four years, and many massive challenges lie ahead; not least the multipartisan challenge of making politics serious again. In whatever other ways politicians will fail spectacularly, I wonder if they can at least manage that.

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Kathleen Stock is Contributing Editor at UnHerd.

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