Ed Davey on Hillary Clinton, restive Lib Dem MPs and chess

Ed Davey has been talking to Hillary Clinton:

"We talked about how we need to fight Reform in the way they need to fight Donald Trump, and she gave me some choice advice, which I'm not going to repeat because that would be unfair on her."

He's also been talking to PoliticsHome – that's a quote from an interview they've posted this evening.

"Pressed" (as if he needed pressing) to say more his meeting with Hillary Clinton, he added:

"She said you have to be very strong and stand up to bullies and don't cave in and cosy up to them. She didn't say she was criticising Keir Starmer, but I think the approach we [the Lib Dems] have taken, and the approach that someone like the Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, has taken, is the sort of approach she will endorse."

He described Clinton as "very friendly and very warm!: "You could tell that she realised that we had shared values."

The interviewer, Zoe Crowther, then turned to restlessness among Liberal Democrat MPs. This is part of Ed's answer:

"I'm restless like they are… I share their restlessness," Davey told PoliticsHome, while stressing that his MPs and the party “work really well together”.

However, in a bid to face down his critics, the Lib Dem leader pointed to his electoral record.

"The polls are the polls, but the elections are the elections," he told PoliticsHome.

"Winning elections is what we've done under my leadership. If we make net gains in May, it will be the eighth year in a row we've made net gains, the sixth under my leadership. It's never happened before. That's a continual increase, year on year.

"This year we could well beat Labour and the Tories for the number of councillors we elect for the second year in a row, and it’s never happened previously."

He insisted that the Lib Dems are "still the most united parliamentary party" despite recent negative briefings.

The MPs know how well the party as done in elections under Ed Davey – I mean, they would, wouldn't they? – but that success is not a complete answer to their restlessness. I suspect that restlessness is rooted in disappointment that achieving the best result by a Liberal party in over a century in 2024 has done so little to raise our profile.

You can complain about media bias, but we have to ask whether our style of campaigning is one of the causes. We adopted the "three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can't win here" approach that won us spectacular by-election victories in the last parliament at the general election too, and our still using it two years on.

Ask the public what the Lib Dem approach to the economy is, and they would be justified in asking how they are supposed to know, even if they've noticed the stand-alone proposals we have made.

And this concentration on target seats in the South of England has coincided with a further fall in our core vote. Yes, we're now in a novel landscape, but in council by-elections where we have not campaigned, there hardly seems to be a Lib Dem vote at all.

To end on a happier note, Ed also talks about chess:

Davey – similarly to Chancellor Rachel Reeves – played chess competitively until he was about 12 years old, though he said he would "not put myself up as a great chess player" anymore. 

"Playing the long game, that's the key thing in chess," he said. 

Ed my be pleased to learn that my blog post about his chess game with Mike Ross in Hull was responded to on Bluesky by the eight-time Russian chess champion Peter Svidler.

I also liked Svidler's comment on Rachel Reeves.

timid, indecisive, unwilling to commit to even temporary sacrifices when the situation calls for a reassessment, and drastic measures might be needed. the chess game is meh too.

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— Peter Svidler (@polborta.bsky.social) 11 April 2026 at 13:07