The well-heeled are just as likely to unseat politicians they don’t like as the hard-up. And their votes matter more. Or so it seems after the July 4 UK general election and the big pay-off for the Liberal Democrats.
The Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage won 14 per cent of the votes cast but captured only five seats. The Liberal Democrats under Ed Davey secured only 12 per cent of the vote but won 72 seats. Now the third largest party in the House of Commons, behind only Labour (411 seats) and the Conservatives (121), the Lib Dems have never won so many seats before since they were founded in 1988.
Both Reform and the Liberal Democrats won over Conservative voters. So why did Reform win so few seats and the Lib Dems so many?
Rich pickings
The answer: The 14 per cent who voted for Reform were scattered all across the country. They were more thinly spread than the Liberal Democrats, concentrated in the more affluent parts of the country. Among the 325 least prosperous constituencies in the country, the Lib Dems have only seven members of parliament, according to the Economist. The 65 other Liberal Democrat MPs represent better off areas.
This was deliberate strategy and it paid off. In 2019, the Liberal Democrats won 11 seats with 3.7 million votes. This time, they won 72 seats with 3.5 million votes by campaigning only in selected areas. As the Economist noted, the “Lib Dems gutted the Conservatives in their prosperous heartlands across southern England, cantering to victory in seats such as Wimbledon, Henley and Thame, and Chichester”.
Henley and Thame is a typical Lib Dem gain. It had been Tory since 1910, and the former prime minister Boris Johnson was once its MP. It is also one of the most prosperous of the 650 parliamentary constituencies. The Liberal Democrats now control five of the 10 most prosperous constituencies, according to Automatic Knowledge, a data-analysis company.
Besides Henley and Thames, the Liberal Democrats captured other seats previously held by Conservative heavyweights, including Stratford-on-Avon, earlier represented by Nadhim Zahawi, and Surrey Heath, formerly Michael Gove’s constituency.
Campaign stunts
No wonder the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey sang and danced when the election results came out. He ran a picture-friendly campaign during which he performed attention-grabbing stunts such as bungee-jumping and falling off a paddleboard into a lake.
Daisy Cooper, the party’s deputy leader, said the tactics worked. “We’ve said time and again that while we don’t take ourselves that seriously, we do take our politics very seriously,” she told BBC News. “And with every single one of those stunts, there was a very serious message about our plans.”
How the ‘blue wall’ turned yellow
Six out of ten Liberal Democrat voters say they are financially comfortable, but the rich also have problems. And sewage and pollution, health and social care, the issues the Lib Dems campaigned on, resonated with the voters. That’s how the “blue wall” of Conservative safe seats turned yellow, the colour of the Lib Dems.
Davey could talk about suffering. His father died when he was four, leaving his mother to raise three boys under 10 until she had breast cancer. “My little brother and I nursed her until she died when I was 15, so I was a young carer,” he said.
“A significant driver of Lib Dem support seems to have come from voters in normally safe Conservative seats, who wanted to get the governing party out and found Mr. Davey’s centrist party more palatable than the centre-left Labour Party,” reported the New York Times.