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SOPHY RIDGE: … on Thursday night Jo Swinson lost her seat and saw just 11 MPs returned for her party. That leaves the Lib Dems with one less MP than they had after the 2017 election and 10 less than at the start of the campaign because all the people who defected from other parties failed to win their seats. Joining us now to discuss where they go next is the Party’s joint acting leader, Sir Ed Davey, thank you very much for coming on the programme.

ED DAVEY: Good morning.

SR: Let’s discuss the elephant in the room first, there’s a vacancy at the top of your party. Are you planning on running for the leadership again?

ED DAVEY: Well we’ve just had a very tough election, I’m delighted to have won my seat but I am talking to colleagues who have had some really tough times and lost their seat. What we are going to do, as acting leader I am going to ensure that we review the general election properly, learn those lessons and make sure we are fit to oppose this Boris Johnson government as it is our job to do. So that’s the role I’ll be focusing on in my role as acting leader.

SR: Can you give us a bit of an idea of the time frame for this? When is the leadership election likely to take place?

ED DAVEY: Well the board of the party is going to meet in January and is going to set the timetable for the leadership election. As acting leader I will obviously be supporting the board but focusing on talking to our members, not just our party’s members but supporters and many people who want a progressive centre party are deeply disappointed at the moment and I think it is vital that they see politicians admitting where mistakes were made but also standing up to this quite nationalistic right-wing Conservative government that has been elected.

SR: So to just be crystal clear, you are not ruling yourself in or out?

ED DAVEY: It’s too early for that. We’ve got to focus on ensuring we learn the lessons properly, in quite a deep profound way. One of the lessons I have to say is it can be very difficult for the democrats to make progress when there is a hard left leader of the Labour party. We found that in 1983 with Michael Foot, we found it in spades in 2019 with Jeremy Corbyn. If you look at the Conservative leaflets in Liberal Democrat constituencies, it wasn’t so much get Brexit done they were talking about, they were saying if you vote Liberal Democrat you’ll get Jeremy Corbyn and that fear factor was a massive issue in the election.

SR: At the same time though, many people would look at this and think this was a perfect opportunity for a party of the centre ground to come through when many people feel Boris Johnson is a right wing Prime Minister and then you have an unpopular leader on the left wing. Surely this gives you space in the centre ground that you failed to grasp.

ED DAVEY: Well we clearly failed to grasp it and we need to learn lessons of why but I am pointing out to you that there are a lot of liberal Conservatives who really don’t like Brexit, don’t like Boris Johnson but they actually fear Jeremy Corbyn even more and you don’t have to believe me – look at the leaflets that the Conservative party were putting out in the key seats we were trying to win. They played on that fear factor of Jeremy Corbyn and what I hope is we can see the Labour party reform because we do need to work cross-party, we need to cooperate. We tried that very much in the last Parliament as we tried to get a People’s Vote, we didn’t quite get the full cooperation that we needed. We tried that at this election, we were working with the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, we tried to work across party boundaries but in the first past the post with a very hard left unpopular leader of the Labour party, it proved very, very difficult.

SR: Now when you were on the show before the election I asked what you would have done differently to Jo Swinson if you had been elected leader. Just have a quick look at what you told me before, you said you would have done nothing differently, ‘I think she has been doing a fantastic job, I think her leadership on Brexit has been inspiring.’ What would you actually have done differently?

ED DAVEY: Well I would certainly have done exactly what Jo did on the Brexit question. We are a pro-European party, we believe Britain should remain in the EU. I am very proud that Jo led a party where she made that a central proposition and …

SR: I think the question is more about what you would have done differently not the same.

ED DAVEY: Well as acting leader I want to work out what went wrong.

SR: What do you think that was?

ED DAVEY: Well let us look at this in detail. I was at the board meeting yesterday in Liberal Democrat HQ where we set up a general election review. We’ll look at all the details, no stone will be left unturned. Clearly we must have made mistakes or we wouldn’t have had the result that we did but all I am saying is, judging from what I have already heard from members and from candidates and from party activists, the Conservative party beat us in many seats that we were expecting to win because they played on the fears of Jeremy Corbyn, that’s just a fact. We will also have to own up to mistakes that we made, I’m not denying that whatsoever …

SR: So what are they? It does seem a little bit like you’re blaming Jeremy Corbyn, you say you wouldn’t have done anything differently on Brexit than Jo Swinson so what were the mistakes? You can’t blame external factors for everything.

ED DAVEY: No, you are asking me to rush to early judgement and I’m saying I’m not going to.

SR: You must have a sense, you’ve been out door knocking so you must have a sense of what went wrong.

ED DAVEY: Let me give you one example, I think we didn’t get the other messages over about what Liberal Democrats stand for and we didn’t get beyond the stock Brexit position. So for example we have a very strong position on climate change, in fact Jo and I both said during this election that in many ways tackling the climate emergency was even bigger than stopping Brexit but I’m not sure if that very strong Liberal Democrat record and that strong set of Liberal Democrat policies on climate change got through to enough voters and I think one of the challenges we failed to manage was making sure that people understood that the Liberal Democrats aren’t just the stop Brexit party, we have many other very attractive policies which should have brought more people to vote for us.

SR: What about the policy to revoke Article 50, to cancel Brexit, if you won a majority? Was that a distraction?

ED DAVEY: Well I want to look at the data on that because we did some data where it was bringing people to us as well as some data showing that it wasn’t working but because I actually believe in evidence based policies, it’s why I don’t think we should leave the EU because the evidence is actually we’re better off in the EU, I want to see the evidence before I …

SR: Well the evidence is that you only won 11 MPs isn’t it?

ED DAVEY: It was not a good night, I am not going to pretend but there were glimmers of hope, let’s remember that. Our vote share went up, we are now second in many more seats than we were before the last election so I think the Liberal Democrats can rebuild. I think we can come back strong and I think if we focus on those very positive messages – defending human rights for example. We’ve got a government that has been elected on a mandate to attack the human rights legislation, to actually go after the courts attacking I think the independence of the judiciary on things like judicial reviews. We’ve got good liberal value issues which we can champion and I’ll tell you one thing that is going to happen very soon, we’re going to see I hope and expect a report on Russian interference in British elections actually published. I think that will be very interesting and it will be the Liberal Democrats who will be holding Boris Johnson in person to account for his links to Russian business people.

SR: Was the biggest mistake of the election campaign backing the election in the first place, from the Liberal Democrats? It seemed like it was an act of political suicide in retrospect.

ED DAVEY: No, I think that’s not looking at what the dilemma was and the dilemma was this: we had tried time and time again to get a People’s Vote, to get a referendum so people had the final say. We had 17 attempts at that but unfortunately the Labour party didn’t show up in the numbers that were required so therefore we were then faced with the Boris Johnson Withdrawal Bill getting a majority with 19 Labour MPs supporting and there was a real fear that that Withdrawal Agreement would get through the House of Commons so the dilemma was this – do we have an election after Britain had legally withdrawn from the EU with the Withdrawal Act or did we have one before? That was the choice. We were faced with this really, I think, meaningless slogan of ‘Get Brexit done’ but if we had not had an election we’d have had some sort of other meaningless slogan like Let’s Move On. So it was a really difficult judgment to make and I think people at the moment are not seeing what was in the face of British Parliament at the time.

SR: One of the people who has perhaps paid the ultimate price for that decision is Jo Swinson herself, she lost her seat. Do you feel sorry for her?

ED DAVEY: Absolutely, the whole party is deeply upset and disappointed. Jo was a friend and a colleague and I want her back in Parliament as soon as possible. She has so much to offer British politics and our thoughts are with her and her family but we know that she has a bright future and we thank her for what she did and I hope that we can ensure that what she argued for and her legacy on the Brexit issue can continue because Liberal Democrats will continue to oppose Brexit in Parliament. I am sure we will get the legislation now, it will go through but now the hard part starts for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. I do not believe they can get Brexit done in the next year as they said they can. They have told voters, Leavers and Remainers, that they will get Brexit done next year – they won’t.

SR: And your view on the loss of the seat by Jo Swinson was perhaps not shared by everybody who saw those results coming in. You saw the video of Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the SNP, celebrating when Jo Swinson lost her seat – you can see it there on the screen. I’m sure you’ve seen this, what’s your reaction?

ED DAVEY: Well it’s not very dignified and I think that approach to politics, taking glee in someone else’s defeat as she did there, in a very personal way, isn’t appropriate for the First Minister of Scotland.

SR: Okay, Ed Davey, thank you very much for being on the programme this morning.