Ed Davey is facing a growing revolt against his leadership of the Liberal Democrats, following the resignation of a senior frontbench figure on Friday.
Charlie Maynard, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson, has handed in his resignation in an attempt to unseat Davey after months of frustration that the party is failing to cut through with voters, the Guardian understands.
Daisy Cooper, the party’s deputy leader, immediately backed Davey, saying he enjoyed the support of the “vast majority of MPs”, who wanted him to lead them into the next election and were “furious at this distraction”.
“We Liberal Democrats are the last line of defence against a Reform UK government, and Ed is determined to lead a strong and united party into the next general election whenever it comes,” Cooper said in a statement.
“As Ed said at conference, we are in the fight of our lives against the right who want to turn our country into their version of Trump’s America.”
Maynard’s resignation, first reported by the Financial Times, came four days after Alison Bennett, the Lib Dem care and carers spokesperson, stood down from the frontbench.
Davey has led the party since 2019, first as acting leader and then officially from August 2020. At the 2024 general election he steered the party to its most successful result in more than 100 years. The party now has 71 MPs, and is the third biggest party in the House of Commons. But the party has slipped to fourth or fifth in national opinion polls behind the Greens and Reform UK, and frustration has mounted over a failure to attract voters in a disparate political landscape.
At the party’s conference in Brighton in September, Davey played down criticism from a Liberal Democrat council leader who questioned whether he was the right person to lead the party. Julian Brazil, the leader of Devon county council, said the party was “sleepwalking into irrelevance” and “lacking ambition”.
Davey unveiled a plan for a £17bn income tax cut in a speech aimed at shoring up the party’s support among former Conservative voters, which he said would be paid for entirely by increased growth, created through rejoining the EU’s single market and customs union.
But his resistance to Labour’s proposals to change the pension triple lock to help pay for a national care service, announced in Andy Burnham’s Labour Party conference speech, was met with opposition by senior and backbench Lib Dems, with one saying his defence of the current policy “gaslights an entire generation into believing it’s for our benefit”.
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