Sir Edward Davey has won the leadership battle for the British Liberal Democrats against Layla Moran.
Davey won nearly two thirds of the vote, with almost 70 000 people casting a ballot in the contest. All Lib Dem party members were eligible to vote.
The position of party leader became vacant when Jo Swinson lost her parliamentary seat in last year’s British elections. The leader of the Lib Dems is required to be a Member of Parliament, which meant that Swinson had to resign.
Davey has been MP for Kingston and Surbiton since 1997. He lost his seat in 2015 but regained it two years later in 2017’s snap election. He served as the party’s deputy leader since September last year.
The Lib Dems, who achieved their most successful result in 2010 (in terms of overall vote share), winning 23% of the vote and 57 seats in Westminster, have fared poorly in recent elections. The party went into a governing coalition with the Conservative Party (when Davey had served in the Cabinet), but this cost them in the following election, when they won only 8% of the vote and eight parliamentary seats. In 2019, the party won 12% of the vote and 11 Westminster seats.
Following his win, Davey said the party’s string of poor results over the past decade meant that it had to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’. He was quoted as saying: ‘Voters don’t believe we share their values. And voters don’t believe we are on the side of people like them. Voters have been sending us a message, but we have not been listening. It is time for us to start listening. I am listening now.’
[Picture: By Chris McAndrew, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61323369]