Splash! Ed Davey Falls In Again — And So Do His Ideas

Opening verdict from the nation’s eye-roll

There he is again, mistaking a leisure centre for a lobby briefing. After the endless dunkings and yet another “let’s wait and see” about doing a deal with Sir Keir—Britain’s head boy of beige—the public’s review is now a national ringtone: “Whata complete twat.” If you run politics as a splash park, don’t be shocked when the lifeguard chalks “no diving” on your credibility.

Sir Ed Davey is grandly present and somehow smaller every time you look—a human footnote bobbing at the edge of the news. He’s the weather app in a hurricane: technically there, spiritually irrelevant. In Westminster he registers like soft background hum from a faulty fridge. You meet his gaze and feel the tug of cosmic insignificance—as if the great dramas of state are taking place off-screen while our man rehearses his next entry-level pratfall.

The face that mimes gravitas

The camera finds Sir Ed and the eyebrows assemble like a village fete flypast—plucky, off-kilter, faintly adhesive. He has Year Five assembly energy: hands clasped, lips puckered into “serious,” an expression that says “I’m doing grown-up now” while his shoes squeak with pool water. It’s credibility attempted through mime. Nationwide verdict: stop pulling faces and finish a sentence without handrails.

Stunt. Soundbite. Sermon. Repeat.

His comms revolution is brutalist simplicity: Pledge → Plunge → Pundit. He falls off something buoyant, resurfaces draped in soggy virtue, then—halo dripping—announces policy on sewage, dentistry or windfall taxes. The splash upstages the sermon; sincerity arrives waterlogged. It’s Lib Dem sincerity that fecking useless—so earnest it steams up the room while achieving the square root of bog-all.

The trainee social worker school of competence

Operationally, Davey exudes the competence of a trainee social worker on day three: keen, clutching a ring-binder, making bullet points about “stakeholders,” then spilling tea on the case notes. You sense the form-filling is immaculate and the outcomes… somewhere else. He can convene, consult, and “co-produce” until the dolphins come home; ask him to decide, and suddenly we “must wait for the arithmetic.”

Starmer’s sensible brogues vs. Ed’s luminous crocs

Starmer is a laminated user manual. Davey is a PTA treasurer with a foghorn, clomping about in Chernobyl-orange crocs. Where Keir rolls out bullet points, Ed zip-lines in, the bullet points stuffed down his wetsuit like contraband. The press, magpies of Westminster, follow the shine and film the splash—then quietly forget the paragraph that followed. Insignificance again: maximum noise, minimum residue.

“Not a pact”—the coalition that dare not speak its name

Ask about teaming with Labour and he performs the ancient Lib Dem dance: the Curtsy of Principle followed by the Shuffle of Contingent Arithmetic. He will never dine with Reform (bravo). As for Keir? “Depends on the numbers.” Translation: if the spreadsheet coughs politely, he’ll be outside Downing Street practising his “duty calls” face in the wing mirror of a ministerial Prius. It’s not a pact; it’s an understanding—like claiming you don’t cheat, you merely audit options.

The almost-likeable menu—served on a lilo

Infuriatingly, the policies often read fine—until the maître d’ arrives dripping:

• Windfall tax → Energy Security Bank. Robin Hood with a Bloomberg terminal: skim the City to butter national boilers. Expect a glossy logo, a website, and one flickering plug socket.

• Four-step waltz back to Brussels. Trust → bolt-on deals → coy customs union → see how we feel after pudding. Brexit in reverse with napkins—Britain as the awkward ex asking to share the breadbasket “as friends.”

• Make rivers less… brown. Clap water firms like errant labradors and stop using chalk streams as conveniences. Morally obvious; ideally not announced from a wobbling paddleboard.

• Dentistry rescue. More NHS appointments so children stop chewing with their memories. Necessary, unglamorous; still introduced by a man dressed for a Centre Parcs incident.

• Carers and social care. The one item that reads human: help the people keeping grandma upright. Good—and therefore destined to trend for six minutes.

• 380,000 homes a year. Including 150,000 social. Architecturally noble, politically Sisyphean; housing targets here are HS2 with curtains.

• Rail fares frozen, confusion thawing slowly. “Simplify” tickets—British for “write ‘best price guaranteed’ on a kiosk that’s on fire.”

• Asylum “Nightingale” hubs. Wartime branding for paperwork triage. If adding “Nightingale” conjures competence, book me a Nightingale MOT.

• Legal cannabis, tastefully packaged. Adult policy dressed as a garden centre—biodegradable edibles, stern signs about not paddleboarding while giggling.

• Proportional representation. The house religion: fix the rules so third parties don’t get brained by arithmetic. Mathematically right; optically like turning up to a rave with a calculator.

Individually, many of these would help. Collectively, delivered via Pledge → Plunge → Pundit, they evaporate into that fine British mist we call “awareness” without ever condensing into power. That’s the Davey paradox: visible yet insignificant.

Performative pragmatism, the house style

The Lib Dem signature sauce is performative pragmatism—play the grown-up while arriving on an inflatable flamingo. Fixes are practical-ish, framed as children’s telly, topped with an appeal to “work with anyone sensible,” Westminster code for “I’ll hold your coat if you let me near the red box.” It isn’t wicked. It’s worse: needy and negligible.

From the petrolhead pew: go faster, think straighter, stop faffing with theatrical splashes. If your rivers are filthy, sack someone before elevenses. From the sketch-writer’s loft: Davey doing Very Grave at the despatch box while the eyebrows attempt lift-off is rich comedy; he could launch a citizens’ assembly and make it look like an unboxing video. The man confuses procedure with performance, then wonders why the room yawns.

Gravity is undefeated

Stunts take off. Governments land—or crash. After the election, arithmetic won’t care for crocs or captions. It will demand adult verbs: govern, cut, fund, reform. At that moment, the GoPro becomes a paperweight and the lake a metaphor you can’t drink. He’ll need more than the competence of a trainee social worker and the insignificance of a lobby footnote; he’ll need to choose, risk, offend.

In which the nation repeats itself

So yes, throw the tomatoes. He asks for it: Britain’s first amphibious statesman, the Evel Knievel of tepid centrism, a man who confuses the roar of the crowd with the voice of history. And yet—curse the gods—some of the policies are fine, even good. It’s a decent roast served in a bouncy castle.

But until he stops miming gravitas, bins the splash routine, and proves he can do more than file a compassionate risk assessment, the national verdict will remain the same, crisp and cruel, whenever the wetsuit hoves into view: “Whata complete twat.”