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Pondering this evening Lib Dem leadership elections over the past 21 years (I wasn’t around for the one in 1988).
1999 is the only time we’ve had 5 candidates standing at once: Kennedy, Simon Hughes, Malcolm Bruce, David Rendel and Jackie Ballard.
What’s interesting about that one was that none of the candidates came from what you’d think now as the right of the party. The closest was maybe Bruce. All the other candidates were tacking left of Kennedy.
The issue in that election was about relations with Labour and in particular Blair and the joint cabinet committee. Ashdown leading the party into a merger was a very real fear at the time - coming from the left of the party. The right was broadly backing Ashdown.
The fear was that Kennedy was the establishment candidate who would simply continue in that vein. That he didn’t do this surprised both sides; the right never forgave him and the left ended up adopting him (for the most part; skipping over Iraq http://www.theliberati.net/quaequamblog/2008/02/26/15-february-2003-five-years-and-11-days-later/)
2006, like 2017 was a “too soon” election in which an unwilling greybeard caretaker was thrust forward by the establishment to look after things until the thrusting Golden One was ready to take over. Unlike in 2017, it was opposed.
And so we found Menzies Campbell opposed by former city broker and Orange Book contributor, as the left’s bright hope (Simon Hughes also stood, to little impact). It was pretty sedate; the party was pretty bruised over the ousting of Kennedy.
Campbell was seen as inoffensive and effective to most people. Huhne therefore didn’t get much of a look in. And yet Campbell, rightly or wrongly, proved to be a disaster. A lot of his performance prefigured Corbyn.
In other words an elder foreign policy specialist used to the media giving him an easy time asking about his favourite topic and subsequently unable to cope with more critical and wide ranging questioning. Either way, he only lasted 18 months.
Clegg versus Huhne in 2007 was the main event. I’d say it was a bitter ideological feud, and it certainly had a lot of bitterness, but while Huhne tacked to the left, Clegg frustratingly said almost nothing about his policy positions on anything.
Clegg very deliberately offered nothing but motherhood and apple pie to everyone, and it was fairly effective. Several people on the left of the party endorsed him.
This was in spite of the developing Orange Book narrative about Liberal Clegg seeking to save the party from Huhne’s (and Kennedy’s) ruinous social democracy.
The thing I found striking was the extent to which the Guardian backed Clegg. A lot of that was to do with so many journalists who were former colleagues of Huhne really laying into him. Nick Cohen in particular I remember being especially venomous.
The result ended up being eye wateringly close. Clegg did not run a good campaign. Unfortunately for Huhne, he also made mistakes - particularly regarding the Calamity Clegg memo debacle: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/nov/19/liberaldemocrats.uk
Fundamentally, while Clegg was troubling, Huhne kept giving the appearance of being a liability. Of course, years later he would end up going to prison for perverting the course of justice over a speeding fine issue. It’s possible the party dodged a bullet there.
And yet, Clegg should not have come so close to losing to opponent who the press hated and who scored so many own goals during the campaign.
For my own part, high on hubris having got a gig writing pieces for the Guardian, I ended up backing Clegg. Looking back, I honestly couldn’t tell you who would have been the better leader; they both turned out to be flawed in such different ways.
Of course, as soon as Clegg did get elected, he started pushing forward the very right wing policy agenda that he so scrupulously avoided talking about during the campaign. It was clear that the real battle for the soul of the party was on; and the left lost.
But that was after the election; before then Clegg refused to be drawn on it and played it down. Huhne’s attacks on him may have been clumsy but for the most part they proved to be very accurate. It was a phoney war.
2015 was almost as bitter a campaign as 2007, mainly because of Norman Lamb’s decision to conduct a push polling operation to discredit Farron. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/21/norman-lamb-lib-dem-leadership-suspected-data-breach
What’s notable about that was that the same names would pop up later as some of the people behind the Leave campaign’s dodgier practices. But again, I hate to say it, the dodgy practices exposed a real issue; Farron’s homophobia, which he eventually admitted to lying about.
There are real echoes between that campaign and 2020: a concerted operation to stop a candidate seen as too critical of the coalition and too left wing. On that occasion it didn’t work; time will tell if it’s successful now.
2017’s campaign ended up being a non-event, with the coronation of Vince Cable - again a caretaker leader. Cable’s tenure was not as disastrous as Campbell’s - under much less scrutiny to be fair - but neither did it make much of an impact.
Indeed, Cable seemed to spend most of his time doing the spadework for the creation of Change UK and, subsequently, the mass defections the LDs briefly enjoyed in 2019.
He had a surprisingly good round of local and European elections in 2019, largely because the party held above the fray in the way that Change, partially his creature, did not. The LD’s subsequent GE campaign was much more Change-like both in tone and performance.
Finally, the 2019 leadership election was interesting because on that occasion, the left and much of the establishment swung behind Swinson. As a result it was a fairly good natured affair. And yet it seems as if we didn’t have the discussion that we so badly needed.
As I mentioned above, the approach of forming a broad alliance with disaffected Tories and Labour MPs begun with Cable still went ahead despite the warning signs in the European elections, and was still pretty disastrous.
Jo Swinson gets a lot of blame for that decision, but we were already on those railroad tracks and it’s hard to see what Davey would have done differently. There’s a sense of inevitability about the 2019 campaign.
Okay, so what conclusions do I draw from this ramble? Mainly that leadership elections don’t seem to do much to set strategy and party direction. Kennedy ended the Lib Lab cooperation despite being the favoured candidate of Lib-Labbers...
Clegg pursued a policy direction he was very careful to conceal in the leadership election; Farron’s downfall was the very thing he insisted wasn’t an issue; Davey would almost certainly have had the same disastrous 2019 as Swinson.
Fundamentally, pay attention to what candidates are saying about strategy and who is backing them, and pay less attention to policy, which is largely out of the leader’s direct control anyway (but do organise if you care about policy; don’t leave it too late like we did in 2007)
Particularly pay attention to the dogs that don’t bark; the issues that seem to be off limits or “unfair” to raise and the ones raised as innuendo. And definitely don’t take reassurances for granted. It isn’t even enough to have things written down.
Ultimately, if you buy into the idea of parties having leaders then personalities and the ability to command respect matters, no matter how uncomfortable candidates might be addressing this. In as far as you can, that’s the area you need to be scrutinising.
Oh, and going forward, be ambivalent about leaders - even the best ones. Never drink the Kool Aid. Don’t be a fan; be a critical ally. It’s much more exhausting but far more valuable. You don’t need to be a cheerleader; sadly there are only too many perfectly willing to do that
