Lib Dems seek radical reinvention as internal frustration over leader's cautious approach grows

The Liberal Democrats are gathering for their conference this weekend carrying an uncomfortable secret: two years after their best general election result in party history, many of them think something has gone badly wrong.

Behind closed doors, conversations with MPs, frontbench figures, and party staff paint a picture of mounting frustration. The party won 72 seats in 2024—a genuine breakthrough—but the momentum has stalled. YouGov polling ahead of the conference shows the Lib Dems have gained no real ground since that election and have actually slipped backward. The energy that carried them to victory has dissipated. "We lack the ability to say something new or interesting," one senior MP said bluntly. "There is no energy, no excitement."

The complaints cluster around two things: message and medium. A frontbencher described the party's public positioning as relentlessly cautious—"a Lib Dem spokesperson said, steady on now, gently does it"—with the sole exception of their stance on Trump. Others use the word "boring." The party's leadership made a deliberate choice months ago not to adopt the punchy, social media-focused style of Zack Polanski, the rising Green Party leader, reasoning that such an approach wouldn't resonate in the affluent southern English constituencies that form the Lib Dem base. But that calculation has left the party trailing badly on digital platforms. Senior figures despair that MPs only recently received training on making social videos. When the party scores a win, it can mobilize a leaflet to supporters instantly; the same urgency doesn't apply to social media. At least 17 fringe events at conference will focus on digital and social media strategy—a tacit admission that the party has fallen behind.

Yet some in the party worry the problem runs deeper than tactics. Recent polling shows 52 percent of voters view the Lib Dems as weak, with 43 percent saying it's unclear what the party stands for. "We need to become bolder and more radical," a senior MP said. "We need to be angry on behalf of our constituents." Another described the party as trapped in local guerrilla campaigning with no broader articulation of what a Liberal Britain would actually look like. Even party strategists acknowledge the uncomfortable truth: the party's 2024 success came largely because voters wanted to remove the Conservatives. The Lib Dems benefited from anti-Tory sentiment, not from a compelling positive case for themselves. "We haven't yet answered why people should vote for us rather than against the Tories," one senior advisor admitted.

The party leadership is aware of the discontent and promises this conference will mark a turning point. Deputy leader Daisy Cooper told me it would be "a gloves-off kind of conference" with "fighting talk." She described leader Ed Davey not as the mild-mannered figure he sometimes appears but as "a real fighter" who sees the battle with Reform UK as the "fight of our lives." Cooper and others will use the conference to articulate what they call "stage two"—after the first two years of bedding in a large new intake of MPs, now comes the work of winning the national argument and describing what Liberal Britain looks like.

But here is where the internal frustration sharpens into something more pointed: a sizeable group of Lib Dem MPs and frontbench figures openly question whether the problem is not the message or the strategy, but Ed Davey himself. "I think he's holding us back," said one party spokesperson who is planning a leadership bid if an opening emerges. Another MP said the atmosphere is "ripe for a leadership challenge." The obstacle, as one MP framed it, is that the party lacks an ambitious young alternative willing to put themselves forward—no equivalent to Wes Streeting, Labour's defence secretary, who challenged Keir Starmer and exposed fractures in his leadership.

Davey's supporters counter that his government experience is irreplaceable and that national polling is the wrong metric for measuring Lib Dem strength. One frontbencher loyal to him noted he would rather be on 10 percent in national polls while winning 80 seats than on 15 percent while winning four. They point to the party's ground game and local election gains in May as evidence the strategy is working. But frustration persists, and party members are watching alternatives—Josh Babarinde, the party president; Cooper herself; Max Wilkinson, the home affairs spokesperson—and wondering why they aren't articulating different visions.

When asked directly about the leadership, Cooper was careful. "Ed is absolutely the right leader," she said. "There is no vacancy." Asked if she might ever want the job, she replied: "There is no vacancy at the moment." The precision of that language—the conditional, the opening left deliberately ajar—tells you something about where the party's mind is. The conference this weekend will test whether fighting talk and a gear shift can quiet the doubts, or whether the frustration bubbling beneath the surface will eventually force a reckoning.