Ed Davey inherits a party optimistic about its future – it sounds silly now, but history proves the Lib Dems are survivors

As the cheesy greetings card used to go, today is the first day of the rest of the Liberal Democrats’ life. A day, in other words, for remembering that politics is a gloriously unpredictable business, as the last few years surely prove, full of surprises and opportunities. Not, in other words, is this a day to dwell on the current manifest irrelevance of the Liberal Democrats and their new leader, Sir Ed Davey. They understand their present predicament better than anyone else in any case.

Securing a landslide victory with 42,756 votes, against challenger Layla Moran with 24,564 votes, Ed Davey inherits a party with some great assets, and it’s worth auditing them. It is still alive, for one thing, against all odds. The “dead parrot” party, is as defiant as ever after a decade-long series of near-death experiences. It remains the UK-wide third force. It has a fairly healthy membership, and a small army of activists still operating the kind of community politics that the party developed a half century ago. It is far better organised than for most of its history, and has long since learned the hard way how to make the best of Britain’s odd electoral system, by targeting resources in winnable places and distributing leaflets featuring dodgy bar charts that “prove” that “only the Lib Dems can take this seat”.

The party has 91 second places in mostly Conservative Commons seats. The new leader is a smart, serious man with Cabinet experience and a keen sense of political realities, and an intellectual confidence and ability to hold his own against Johnson or Starmer. Layla Moran has emerged as an asset too, a distinctive, fresh figure in front-line politics, with a gift for grabbing attention. She comes across well.

The party is talking about its future and about its relationship with Labour and the Greens as optimistically as ever. So what if it sounds a bit silly right now? It proves a certain quality of resilience. Like Japanese knotweed, say, the Lib Dems are able to hibernate for long periods, virtually undetectable in public opinion polls, only to sprout and regenerate at remarkable speed when conditions are favourable.

What favourable conditions could these be? Traditionally, before the great coalition experiment of 2010-15 rather messed up the pattern, the Liberal Democrats (and their predecessor parties, the Liberals and the SDP) had only to wait for the inevitable unpopularity of a Conservative government to spark a revival, often via some by-election “sensation”. It happened in the late 50s and early 60s, again in the early 1970s, and for most of the 1980s and the mid-1990s.

It helped to have charismatic, attractive leaders, such as Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe (before the fall), David Steel and Paddy Ashdown. The party actually enjoyed its greatest parliamentary success under the affable Charles Kennedy when the shine came off Tony Blair and New Labour, in around 2005, and again under Nick Clegg when things went wrong for Gordon Brown - but these were times when the Tories were seen as divided and too extreme to be trusted with government on their own terms. The Liberal Democrats’ success is often simply a passive, inverse, function of Conservative failure.

It is not outlandish to imagine a period of enormous unpopularity for the Johnson government over the next few years, with Covid-19 and Brexit pushing the economy into a deep recession. As in America, in such circumstances, the right will tend to regain ground by turning to culture wars, and to divide society against itself to distract from the economic, social and constitutional crises (Scottish separatism) all around. The Liberal Democrats are comparatively well placed in such a political conflict zone. Labour under Keir Starmer is better placed than it was under Jeremy Corbyn to present itself as a moderate unifying force, but even now Labour itself suffers from a considerable residue of mistrust too.

There, then, is the Liberal opportunity, and there is no reason why the party cannot regain strength and representation simply by not being one of the other big “extremist” parties. Electoral advances will follow. At local council, devolved parliament and by-ejection level, the voters might be grateful to be able to vote for a rational party of hope offering radical ideas in a reasoned, sensible fashion.

The national mood will be increasingly pessimistic, and the language of politics more violent and strident; many voters will be looking for a calmer moderate figure to repose some faith in - and Davey, no-one’s notion of a political hurricane, is the very human embodiment of straightforward dull middle-class human decency: “Vote Ed for a Quiet Life!” For those still suspicious of Labour, and the many who until 2015 habitually voted Lib Dem, our Ed would be the man they could finally “come home to”.

The party needn’t fuss too much about policy. They can afford to be vaguely pro-European, to be practical environmentalists, to sympathise with refugees and to support BLM, to offer middle ground economics, fair taxation and a proper, limited, role for the state, constrain the tech giants, defend civil liberties and the BBC, plus argue for a continuing UK with a fully federal constitution - all strong historic themes. Neither should the Lib Dems spend time looking for deals with other progressive parties that won’t materialise, and might anyhow repel the soft Tories they need to win over.

In time, the memory and the effects of the two great blunders that bookended the last decade will fade. The decision by Nick Clegg to enter coalition with the Tories in 2010 was not a risk worth taking (a supply and confidence arrangement would have been better all round) and destroyed credibility on the student fees issue. The decision by Jo Swinson to grant Boris Johnson his early election last year was the other hopelessly hubristic misjudgement, and you don’t need hindsight to see that.

What’s done is done, though, and neither of these past mistakes will stop the Liberal Democrats sprouting up from pavement politics once again. Like the Japanese knotweed, they’ll never go away.