Ed Davey: "It feels even better than the general election"

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Ed Davey gets a good write up in the Guardian today and is not afraid to sound optimistic about Thursday's local election:

According to Davey, the general election trend of less ideologically minded Conservative voters fleeing a party they see as overly weighted towards populism and culture wars has shown no signs of slowing under Badenoch.

"People who were lifelong Conservatives haven't forgiven them, they're not impressed by the leader, and some are put off by this talk of some sort of arrangement with Reform," he said.

And:

While Davey is making no predictions, he is scornful about Farage’s success thus far in building up a Lib Dem-style on-the-ground army.

"This is just anecdotal, but Reform have tried door-knocking one or two places, and they got such a hostile reception from quite a lot of doors, they quickly give up. So they’re not fighting the campaign that we do."

The Guardian correspondent, Peter Walker, make a good point when he says these elections are different for the Lib Dems. We are used to winning council elections as a way of building up strength so we can eventually make a realistic challenge for the Westminster seat.

But on Thursday we will be hoping to strengthen our grip on many of the seats we gained at last year's general election by getting more councillors elected there.

Let me end with a word in support of Ed Davey's stunts for the media. They show that the party has grasped that if the media can get good photos or video from an event, they are much more likely to cover it.

I remember the EU referendum campaign, when the Leave campaign showed much more awareness of this than Remain did. In fact the only thing I can remember from the Remain campaign is George Osborne threatening to put everyone's taxes up.

As Walker says:

Days before the local elections, with Kemi Badenoch demanding apologies over gender identity and Nigel Farage complaining about mental illness diagnoses, Ed Davey was quietly getting on with what he perhaps does best: having fun.

In a converted shed near Stratford-upon-Avon, the Liberal Democrat leader was joking with photographers as he made chocolate truffles alongside Manuela Perteghella, his party’s MP for the formerly true-blue constituency.