Three days on, MPs of all parties are still trying to come to terms with the Lib Dems’ stunning victory, the scale of which shocked even them. “But in the end we didn’t think that was practical.” (Not least because Davey had contracted Covid so could not be there.) Eventually, they plumbed for a big blue balloon, daubed with the phrase “Boris’ bubble”, which Morgan popped on camera. “One idea was that Ed would get on a tractor and drive it through it a field, mowing down blue bails as he went,” said a member of his team. In the event of it being the latter, Morgan’s team had racked their brains, thinking how they could get mass coverage on the scale they received after Chesham and Amersham, when party leader Ed Davey celebrated by smashing plastic blue bricks out of a wall with a mallet, a stunt which put him on every major TV news bulletin. “The expected range was from close defeat to close victory,” said an adviser. Photograph: Jeff Gilbert/Rex Shutterstockīy last Thursday, polling day, the Lib Dems were confident of at least running the Tories very close. North Shropshire, a strongly pro-Brexit seat, fell to the Liberal Democrats.
Johnson in Downing Street on the day after the byelection result. “Farmers who had always put up blue signs in their fields were putting up gold Lib Dem ones instead,” said a party aide. Soon the campaign was taking off, and the Lib Dems knew they had a chance. Morgan was chosen as the candidate, and Lib Dem activists poured in from all corners of the UK in a way that only Lib Dems can do. And this was before Peppa Pig and before ‘ partygate’,” said the official. They were the kind of voters who we knew would never vote Labour but could come over to us. “We found a lot of disillusion and anger with Boris Johnson and the government. “We discovered that the Tory vote was even softer than it had been in Chesham and Amersham. It was top of the safe Tory list, strongly pro- Brexit, and nowhere near being a Lib Dem target.īut such was Morgan’s insistence that within days Dave McCobb, the party’s head of campaigns, headed north with a small team to take a look for himself. In 2019, Morgan, a local accountant, had come a poor third behind the Tories and Labour in this rural seat that had been held by the Conservatives in all but two of the past 189 years.
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