The morning after the Lib Dem nightmare before…. My first thoughts. by Stephen Tall on May 8, 2015

I wrote this for The Times’s Red Box blog this morning. It was published under the heading ‘Lib Dems died the moment they joined the coalition’ – not quite what I wrote, but not so far off the mark…

Numbed disbelief. That’s how Lib Dems have been feeling ever since 10pm when the official exit poll first revealed how bad a night it was going to be for my party. 10 seats? That couldn’t be right, we thought. And it turns out it wasn’t. We did worse: 8 MPs. Not even the most pessimistic, Coalition-hating, Clegg-allergic, Orange Book-phobic Lib Dem thought it could ever get that bad. But it has.

The rout of all but one of our Scottish MPs by the SNP wasn’t entirely unexpected. Nor was the loss of our urban English seats where Labour were the challengers. What is quite stunning – utterly, compellingly, breathtakingly unpredicted – is the scale of our defeat at the hands of our Conservative coalition partners. Across the south and south-west of England and suburban London, they have wiped us off the map. None of us foresaw that, and that makes it far, far worse.

In one top Lib Dem target, where the party ended up finishing third, I was told “Our canvassing goes back years. I thought it was robust. I still do. There were absolutely no signs of this, not even on the ground today.”

Thinking I detected some kind of 1992-style Tory bounce-back a couple of days ago, I got in touch with a senior Lib Dem to ask, “Should we be worried that Cameron’s schedule is targeting so many LibDem-held seats? Do they actually sniff 300+ seats?” No, I was told, they were “wasting their time in Twickenham and Yeovil”. Tell that today to Vince Cable and David Laws.

The Tory advance also makes the Lib Dem post mortem more complicated. We didn’t just lose votes to Labour (that had been priced in) we lost at least as many votes to the Conservatives. For those dissident Lib Dems reaching for the easy answer that’s long been trailed – the party needs to return to its radical, centre-left roots and the progressive voters will surely return – that should be a warning. Labour has just found out to its cost that burrowing yourself further into your comfort zone doesn’t help.

So what does explain the calamitous result? Sure, policy blunders like the tuition fees U-turn played their part, sapping both Lib Dem support and morale. But the real truth is, I think, simpler. We were dead the moment we joined the Coalition. Too Tory for our progressive voters, not Tory enough for our small-c conservative voters – and the voters who remained, the pragmatic, liberal centrists, just aren’t enough to win us many seats.

Maybe it would be different under PR (our 8% of the vote would yield us around 50 MPs) but first-past-the-post is what the voters chose in 2011. And for as long as we have it, a third party looking to be the moderating force will get flattened in the inevitable pincer movement. Incumbency isn’t, it turns out, a magic wand.

When the Coalition was formed in 2010, many of its supporters, including me, pointed out the alternative scenario: the Conservatives calling a second general election later that year on the back of an emergency austerity budget and some populist policies, and winning a convincing mandate with the Lib Dems squeezed out of the picture. That’s indeed what has happened. I guess at least we got five years’ governing under our belts in the interim. That seems like scant consolation this morning.