By any measure, leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey had a very good 2023.
His Party saw considerable gains in the local elections, gaining 405 councillors and winning control of 12 more councils. Incredibly, they also overturned a 19,000 Conservative majority in the 2023 Somerton and Frome by-election to elect Sarah Dyke as their 15th MP.
Davey himself managed to carve out a niche as a champion of issues which are hugely important to ordinary people but often fail to gain traction in Parliament, including the sewage in rivers scandal and the appalling state of NHS dentistry.
I spent some time with him on the campaign trail over the summer and saw for myself how much he’d grown in confidence over the years to become an engaging and popular politician.
Ed Davey has found himself very much in the firing line
PA
By the end of 2023, the Lib Dems were in a better position than they’d been since before the coalition years, and it was widely believed in Westminster that they would batter the Tories in the “blue wall heartlands” – those well-to-do, semi-rural areas in the home counties and South West.
And then the Post Office drama aired, and Ed Davey found himself very much in the firing line.
The drama revealed that Alan Bates, former postmaster and founder of the Justice for Postmasters alliance, wrote to Ed Davey on five occasions in his role as postal affair minister.
Davey responded by telling Bates that a “meeting would serve no useful purpose”.
In the end, Alan Bates contacted Ed Davey no fewer than five times, eventually cutting off communication when the Liberal Democrat leader failed to engage.
Davey’s justification is that he did raise Bates’s concerns with the Post Office but was misled by those in charge, who told him that the IT system Horizon was robust.
He now claims that there were “attempts to stop [him] meeting campaigners” and says that he “bitterly regrets not doing more”.
The question is: will that defence hold?
Senior Conservative ministers have already heavily criticised Davey for his role in the scandal, with Paul Scully, post office minister from 2020-2022, saying that he “airbrushed his actions” and Bim Afolami, economic secretary to the Treasury, saying that Davey had a duty to explain why he did not “ask the right questions” at the time.
To compound his problems, the Liberal Democrat leader has not pulled his punches over the years when other public figures have taken a step out of line.
In fact, in the last few years he has called for the resignations of no fewer than 31 different people – including Robert Jenrick, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak. That censoriousness is now coming back to bite him.
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For now, Ed Davey is clinging on to his job.
But now the can of worms has finally been opened on the Post Office scandal, public outrage has reached fever pitch.
This is a story with such wide-reaching tentacles, with all three major parties implicated in some way. The public wants to see heads roll, and Ed Davey’s could well be one of them.
