More than 2 million leaflets will be distributed by the Liberal Democrats in their target “blue wall” seats this weekend as the party launches its bid to dislodge some of the most senior Conservatives from parliament. The seats of cabinet ministers Jeremy Hunt and Gillian Keegan have been included in the party’s long-planned assault on liberal Tory heartland seats that have been drifting away from the party since 2019. Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath seat was already in Lib Dem plans before the levelling up secretary announced on Friday night he was stepping down. Lib Dem strategists said the party had to deploy a leafleting and digital advertising blitz early on to convince voters, especially those intending to vote Labour in these seats, that Lib Dems were better placed to remove the Tory incumbent. While they believe tactical voting has the potential to work, they want to reach voters while they are focused on the announcement of the election. The Lib Dems are now seeking to begin a “Labour squeeze” in a collection of target seats in Tory southern heartlands, where they have been building momentum. It means the swift return of Lib Dem bar charts claiming they are the only party with a realistic chance of removing the incumbent Tory MP. Activists have already been warned they have a “critical” job to reach voters in the opening weeks of the campaign. A series of 200 digital ads across dozens of seats where the Lib Dems are the main threat to the Tories are being sent to Labour voters. In Hunt’s new seat of Godalming and Ash, for example, the party has compiled a chart based on 2023 local election results, suggesting that it is notionally only narrowly behind the Tories. It argues the party is the “clear choice” in the area and is desperately hoping Labour will not bother to pump its own resources into the seat. “We saw in our recent byelection wins that even massive Tory majorities can be overturned when people swing behind us as the party most likely to beat the Conservatives,” said a Lib Dem source. “Several cabinet ministers are vulnerable, but to deliver a Portillo moment we need Labour supporters to lend us their support as they have in four record-breaking byelection wins. “We know these opening weeks of the campaign will be critical, which is why we are aiming to reach as many voters as possible in top marginal seats where Labour can’t win but we can.” Other senior Tories who had been in the sights of the Lib Dems have already stepped down in the past week, after Rishi Sunak announced the election. Lib Dems had been heavily targeting former Tory cabinet minister John Redwood in Wokingham, but he revealed on Friday that he would not run. Another former cabinet minister on their list, Greg Clark in Tunbridge Wells, also announced he was not standing again.
Running a highly targeted campaign could not be more different from the party’s disastrous 2019 strategy, when it billed former leader Jo Swinson as an alternative prime minister and ran a firmly anti-Brexit message that it believed could see it win as many as 200 seats. When the votes were counted, it returned only 11 MPs, while Swinson lost her own seat to the SNP. A review into that defeat summed it up as a “high-speed car crash”. After a change of course, the party opted to focus on building activist bases in constituencies where it saw potential. They claim that, while the tactic has seen its national poll share remain flat for some time, it is concentrating votes in the right places – with realistic ambitions for modest gains. More recently, the party has been attempting to create a second front in the south-west, where it used to be a strong presence before the decision to enter the Tory-led coalition government.