Looking in on a party still seeking purpose

The second party conference of the season has now wrapped up. This year, the Liberal Democrats returned to Bournemouth. After their recent successes in Dorset, they were very much on home ground. 

The Liberal Democrat conference is always a notably smaller and quieter affair than the equivalents for Labour and the Conservatives. It is, for those of us who go to all the conferences, a much more traditional affair than the Reform conference that we visited a fortnight earlier. 

Going into the conference, the party was still riding high following recent successes in local and national elections. In addition to the seventy-two seats won in the 2024 general election, the Liberal Democrats also won control of a raft of county and county unitary councils in May 2025. These gains were predominantly in the south west and the home counties, where it was generally better to be standing as a Liberal Democrat candidate. 

The breakout wins for Reform in the north and the east of England overshadowed the Liberal Democrat gains. Subsequent media attention has also been focused on Reform, much to the chagrin of many of the Liberal Democrat party faithful who assembled in Bournemouth. The lack of media attention afforded to Ed Davey and his party in comparison to that won by Nigel Farage and his party was a regular topic of conversation. 

The disparity in column inches won by the two parties is linked directly to the fact that one of the parties has a compelling and emotive story that it tells to the British public, while the other has, of late, been far less clear about what its purpose is in 2025. Coming into the conference, the big challenge for Ed Davey was going to be defining that purpose. 

After the Brexit referendum in 2016, it was clear what the purpose of the Liberal Democrat party was. They were the party of Remain and, in local government at least, that helped them to begin a recovery from the nadir of the coalition years. With Brexit settled after the 2019 general election and the Labour Party shifting back toward the centre ground, it was less clear what the Liberal Democrats stood for. 

Over the past two years, Davey has defined himself as much by his stunts and photo opps as his political positions on worthy issues, including social care and cleaning up the country’s rivers, lakes, and seas. In his speech to the party faithful on Tuesday, he sought to answer that question by positioning himself squarely as the opposition to the Nigel Farage bandwagon. 

Time will tell whether this is a fruitful strategy, but there is definitely a space in British politics for this approach. With the Labour and Conservative parties increasingly responding to the Reform threat by trying to out-Farage Farage, there is a role for a political leader to step forward and offer a clear alternative. In a week where Farage and some of his allies have stepped further outside of mainstream political debate (speculating about immigrants eating swans and refusing to disagree with Donald Trump’s science-denying claims about a disproven link between paracetamol and autism) this could be just the right time for Ed Davey to take up this gauntlet. 

Elsewhere at the conference, the party’s activists were focusing on next year’s mayoral elections. Sussex and Hampshire will be big targets for the party and they will likely be Reform’s principal opposition in Greater Essex, where they have a solid and very competent local government base. 

One highlight for the Cratus team was the Sunday morning sea swim with Swim England and Surfers Against Sewage. We were delighted to help out with this and it was fantastic to get such a big turnout of MPs and councillors. 

Next up is the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this weekend. After a relatively upbeat affair in Bournemouth, it will be fascinating to see how different the vibe is among the governing party’s membership.