Ed Davey has pointed to strong showings by the Liberal Democrats at council elections in areas they are targeting at the next general election as a sign they can advance into Conservative territory. The party leader said it was “still too early to see the whole picture in this set of elections, but clearly there are some fantastic results for the Liberal Democrats”. “Over the parliament we have won historic byelections and achieved successive brilliant local election results,” said Davey. “In the blue wall, lifelong Conservative voters are backing the Lib Dems for this first time. We are ready for the general election and so is the country.”
However, elections expert Prof John Curtice suggested the party had failed to make progress. He put the Lib Dems’ projected national share of the vote at 17% – three percentage points down on 2023, a result Curtice said was “disappointing” for Davey’s party. The Lib Dems celebrated a solid hold in the Hampshire city of Winchester, where they gained three council seats from the Conservatives to consolidate their position and now have 33 of the 45 councillors. The party hopes to use this as a springboard for regaining Winchester at the general election, having last held the seat in 2010. The sitting Conservative, Steve Brine, is not standing again and the Lib Dem candidate, Danny Chambers, a local vet, has already been working the patch hard. The party also highlighted the fact it gained two key council seats from Labour in Stockport, which remains under no overall control, as evidence it can beat the Tories in William Wragg’s constituency of Hazel Grove. “It looks like we’ve won the popular vote in Hazel Grove,” a Lib Dem source said. With a third of the seats elected on Thursday, 31 of the 63 councillors in Stockport are now Lib Dems. Wragg is currently sitting as an independent after admitting revealing colleagues’ contact details to a person he met on a dating app. With many councils yet to declare, other Westminster seats highlighted by the Lib Dems where they believe final results will show they have performed well include Elmbridge, which covers Dominic Raab’s seat of Esher and Walton, and Cheltenham, where the local MP is justice secretary, Alex Chalk.
The party also highlighted the fact that after it gained the ward of Chadlington and Churchill in west Oxfordshire, the foreign secretary, David Cameron, now had a Lib Dem local councillor. It was one of seven gains made by the party in the area, where it is the leading party but the council remains under no overall control. Eastleigh council will remain firmly in Lib Dem hands, with the party holding on to all 10 of the seats it was defending. The party has 35 of the 39 seats on the council. The Eastleigh seat at Westminster is held by the Conservative Paul Holmes, but the south coast town is another Lib Dem target. The party held it from 1994, when a historic byelection win highlighted the weakness of John Major’s Tory government, until 2015. Davey’s party has struggled to break 10% in opinion polls in recent months, putting it behind the rightwing populist Reform UK party. The Lib Dems intend to focus their resources at the forthcoming general election on constituencies where they came a strong second to the Tories in 2019, hoping to take high-profile scalps including those of Raab, Chalk and Michael Gove.