I meet Ed Davey at his house in his Kingston and Surbiton constituency, a sprawling Edwardian semi. In the hands of a banker or, for that matter, a regular politician, it would be full of black and white tiles and plantation blinds, but in the hands of the Daveys it looks like an 80s novel, full of elegant chaos, every surface covered in papers, cellos and vests. The Liberal Democrat leader, 57, is unusually open and approachable, guileless; I start bombarding him with the kind of questions you’d ask a friend you hadn’t seen in 20 years. Why have you got a high chair, when your youngest is nine? How come you’ve got so many cars? Two of the cars are theirs, a little electric one and a mobility vehicle for their 15-year-old son, John, who’s disabled; one car is John’s carer’s, and she has a toddler, hence the high chair. One is John’s teacher’s – “he’s taught from home. We tried two special schools, but they didn’t work out. When we started home education, he was non-verbal. He’s now verbal. Which is brilliant,” he beams. We head out to the garden, where I congratulate him on the local election results. They have a good ground game, the Lib Dems, and they’re scrappy: even accounting for the way all parties manage expectations before local elections, they sailed way over their targets. “Our central scenario was about 250 [councillors] in five councils; we ended up with over 400 in 12 councils. So we’re pretty happy,” he says. They made 704 gains in the 2019 local elections, so this is shaping up into a solid recovery after the party’s post-coalition doldrums. “Because the next election is all about getting rid of the Tories …” he begins, and maybe I smirk a bit because he stops – he’s the last man standing of the Lib Dems who served in the coalition cabinet, so fierce anti-Tory rhetoric is still faintly incongruent – “… that is exactly my mission.” Will this party ever enable another Conservative government? “This is really important: we will not put the Conservatives back into government or do any deal with them. What. So. Ever. Personally, I’ve fought them all my life: I fought them in government, I’m fighting them now. They’re beyond the pale, as far as I’m concerned.”
A load of questions shuffle in behind that. What kind of deal would he be seeking with Labour? Is he already in negotiations with Keir Starmer? What would his asks be? Does he think he could get proportional representation over the line? He doesn’t answer any of those, instead giving me this helicopter view: “I’ve been reflecting on past leaders. I joined the party in 1989, I was economics adviser to Paddy [Ashdown], I worked closely with Charles [Kennedy], I had a period as Menzies [Campbell]’s chief of staff, so I’ve seen them close up, and seen them in election campaigns, dealing with this question. There’s a danger that if you focus on after the election, you just get distracted, you spend a load of energy thinking about something that might never happen. My job is to win lots of seats: primarily against the Tories; two against the SNP; one, arguably two, against Labour. I’m going to focus on my job.” His life in politics started in 1987, when he was 21, still a student, and he joined the Tactical Voting group, as he “just wanted the Tories out”. He emphasises that just because he’s had his whole career with the Lib Dems – only two years out of parliament since 1997, when he lost his seat in 2015 – he didn’t get into politics as a career move. And while it’s true that, in 1989, a careerist would have joined a party polling at higher than 5%, his life can still look smooth and gilded, from the PPE degree from Oxford to the succession of spokesperson jobs – education and skills, trade and industry, business, foreign affairs, home affairs – in a party that prized nicely spoken young men with common sense. This impression of an effortless life could not be further from the reality.
He is putting care at the centre of the Lib Dems’ agenda, he says. “It’s the only way to rescue the health service. It’s massive for gender equality … and linked to that, social justice in and of itself.” To have that conversation, he wants to be plain about his perspective, which is not that of a policy wonk, but that of a man who has lived an extraordinary amount of his life as a carer.
He describes a “relatively humble” background: his father from a mining family; his mother the daughter of domestic servants. Davey was the youngest of three boys, and his dad was doing well, working as a solicitor in Nottingham. When he was four, and his brothers were nine (Charles) and seven (Henry), John Davey died of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of 37. “Diagnosed in November, he died in March. I didn’t really know him. When you’re young, you roll with it. The big thing was seeing my mother’s grief, hearing it, knowing something tragic had happened.” His mother, Nina, moved with the boys to a bungalow, and was then diagnosed with breast cancer when Davey was nine. Three years on, she was diagnosed with secondary cancer in her bones. “Henry and I, with help from my maternal grandparents and neighbours, nursed Mum for three years,” he says. “The last 18 months she was bedridden, in a lot of pain. We had this morphine – I used to pour it out and give it to her in a cup.” He became incredibly close to her: “I’d spend hours lying on the bed, talking to her. I was by her side in Nottingham general hospital when she died. I was in my school uniform, on my way to school.” She had been put on a dementia ward. “It was incredibly unsuitable, very shouty, you know how some dementia can be.”
He tells this story matter-of-factly, but it’s full of searingly sad details – how his mother and grandmother bickered in the last few months, because his grandmother used to do all the buttons up when she ironed a shirt, and his mother would struggle to undo them; the carrot and apple juice fasts his mother would try, because conventional medicine was all out of ideas and she went to a naturopath; the ridiculously large meals his grandparents used to make him, when he went to live with them after his mother’s death. “And then my grandad died when I was 18,” he says. “I was pretty angry about that, after all that had happened. It was quite sudden, a heart attack, he couldn’t have been that old, 66. I think he died of a broken heart. He’d lost his only child, who he adored. He was a very, very emotional man.” Ed Davey got through all that without any academic missteps. He was at Nottingham High school, in the year above Ed Balls, and he remembers his conscious decision: “The summer after my mum died, in the kitchen by myself, I had loads of work to do. I thought, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ Previously, I studied to make my mother happy. Because that’s what you do as a kid. Are your parents proud of you? It was a real Rubicon moment for me. That’s when it could have gone wrong. But Mum had been a massive influence in my life, and I went the right way, rather than the wrong way.”
He spent a lot of time with his grandmother: all his university holidays, Christmases, just the two of them, well into his adulthood. “First of all, she was looking after me. Then we were looking after each other. Then she got more frail, after I became an MP. Henry and I became her carers, not in terms of the care I did for my mum or for my son, but looking after her affairs.” When he married Emily Gasson, another prospective parliamentary candidate for the Lib Dems (she stood in four elections, but didn’t get a seat; now she’s a councillor), it was 2005 and he had to move his grandmother to an expensive care home in Kingston. “I said to Emily, ‘We’ll have to mortgage the house to pay for my grandmother’s care home fees.’ Which was quite something to say, because we really couldn’t afford it. The great thing about that care home was, they allowed her to smoke.” When Davey was about to give up smoking, Emily told him to wait until his grandmother died; she really liked having a fag with him. His son was born in 2007, and caring for John is “full on”, he says. “Without going into massive detail, you do the lot. I’m sure lots of professional carers do it with affection, of course they do. But when it’s someone you love dearly, your thought process is completely different. My biggest thing with my son is: when I’m not here, who is going to look after him? Sometimes he hits and pinches – you have to get over that. And my wife and I, we worry, when we’re not here … you read these awful stories about how people are treated. I’m sure all parents whose kids have special needs will understand. It’s the thing that worries me more than anything else in my life.” Gasson, meanwhile, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012. She recovered pretty well – she has remitting MS – then declined again during lockdown. “She’s fighting back, she’s gone fish-eating vegan, lots of exercise, lots of yoga – she’s trying to keep herself as healthy as she can and she does a good job with it.”
“Until I became leader, I didn’t talk about the care side [of my life],” he says. “Partly because it’s private. But I felt, inevitably, people are going to ask me questions about my life. It’s easy with my parents; that’s a long time ago. It’s more difficult with my son, and with Emily’s MS, but it is what it is, and it’s given me an insight into the reality of millions of people’s lives.” We talk about compassion, caring, pluralism, the health service. He’s really trenchant on this: hebelieves in socialised medicine, a completely overhauled system of care to reflect the collective responsibilities we have towards one another. And I have to say, given how central health and care are to his agenda, and how the NHS is as close to an experiment with socialism as we’ve ever come in this country, I’m surprised he’s not more leftwing. He’s not even to the left of the Lib Dems, though he mildly disputes his reputation as an “Orange Book” liberal (so called after the Lib Dems’ pro-free market 2004 treatise, which he co-authored). “I wish people would actually read my chapter in the Orange Book! It’s about local government.” Beveridge was a liberal, he says. But he wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans without the Labour party, I reply. David Lloyd George was a liberal, and he brought in national insurance, Davey says. The Labour party was barely five years old when that happened, I return. I appear to be trying to persuade the leader of the Lib Dems to join a socialist Labour party that doesn’t even exist, using a GCSE study guide on the 20th century.
I suppose it’s because that period in coalition, the start of the most callous government in living memory, still casts a shadow. Davey says he was fighting the Tories constantly: “I didn’t trust them an inch. I didn’t trust George Osborne an inch. We didn’t tell people how much we were fighting the Tories, that was by design, from Nick [Clegg]. He wanted to show that coalitions work. I argued that we should show the bit of the Liberals that’s anti-establishment, that’s reformist, that’s internationalist. But he was the leader. We served at his pleasure.” He names a few big wins over the Conservatives from those years: the Liberal Democrats successfully locked in the government’s offshore wind contracts, so Osborne couldn’t rescind them after 2015, as he tried to; they stopped the Tories freezing benefits when inflation was running at 5%. “I believe in our environmental stuff, I believe in our political reform, I believe in our internationalism, I believe in civil liberties, I believe in our support for public services, I believe we’re caring, that’s who we are. And we weren’t showing it enough. We’re not going to make that mistake twice.” As I get ready to leave, Ed Davey introduces me to John, who is playing a card memory game with his teacher and carer in the room at the front where he does his schooling. Everyone’s encouraging John, very gently, to say “hello”, and my name, and he gets overwhelmed for a second and buries his head in his father’s shoulder, who soothes him so that he can come out with a triumphant, “Hello Zoe!” It’s a moment of ineffable tenderness, trust and patience, such that you’d probably only witness between two other people a handful of times in your life. I thought I was going to make the whole situation a million times more stressful by bursting into tears, but pulled it back from the brink, thank God, by thinking: It would be funny if, after a lifetime trying to persuade people to vote Labour, I ended up voting Lib Dem.