Ed Davey is needlessly giving up bargaining power for the Lib Dems years before an election

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Two years ago today I was in Bournemouth for the last in-person Lib Dem conference, looking at a glossy pamphlet that declared: “Jo Swinson: Britain’s next prime minister.” Today, I am reading Ed Davey’s interview with the Financial Times, in which he was asked if the Lib Dems would facilitate a Conservative government at the next election and replied: “No.” In other words, if you vote Lib Dem at the next election, you will be making a Labour government even more likely. Obviously, any vote for a party other than the Conservatives makes a Labour government more likely, in the sense that the alternative prime minister in a hung parliament is Keir Starmer – and given that we can rule out, as emphatically as the voters did last time, the prospect of the Lib Dem leader becoming prime minister. “They don’t think he’s a decent man; they think he is a populist who plays to the mob.” They sound awfully like Labour voters to me, and the lesson of the Chesham and Amersham by-election, which the Lib Dem candidate won in a cynical nimbyist campaign in June, was that Labour voters will quite happily vote Lib Dem if they think it will GTTO. It wasn’t until the Lib Dems finally held the balance of power in a hung parliament in 2010 that they got a referendum on the alternative vote system, and lost it.