Ed Davey: ‘I lent Ed Balls my A-level history notes and he didn’t return them’

Senior political reporter Craig Munro spoke to four top party leaders for Metro’s 60 Seconds interviews ahead of the General Election on July 4.

You can find our interviews with Keir Starmer of Labour, Rishi Sunak of the Conservatives and Carla Denyer of the Green Party at these links. Nigel Farage of Reform UK declined to take part.

Here is our interview with Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey.

The main thing people are associating you with on this election campaign is all the all the stunts you’ve been doing around the country. Could you take me inside the meetings that you have with your staffers, where they announce what you’re going to be doing for the for the next day?

Well, the truth is, they tell me about 24 hours beforehand what they’ve got planned for me. But the overall idea has been something we’ve been doing for a while now.

When we won the Chesham and Amersham by-election in Buckinghamshire, which nobody expected us to do, as a sort of true Tory heartland seat in the blue wall, there was a stunt of me knocking down a blue wall made of cargo boxes within orange mallet signify that Liberal Democrats were taking on the Tories in their heartlands in the home counties.

When we won in the West Country we had a picture of a door, me showing Boris Johnson the door. So we’ve done these things to get over a political message. I guess the difference in the General Election is the stunts are getting over a policy message.

I think lots of people have understood what we’re trying to do. We’re obviously trying to get people to cover us with good visuals, but we’re also trying to make a serious message. So when I came down that slide during half term with all those kids, I think it’s called a slip and slide, we were talking about mental health of children and young people. And what could be more serious than that?

I’m hoping that by doing it differently, we’re engaging people in our message. But we do have a very serious political message.

I think there were some fears when you took a fall into Windermere, talking about sewage, that there was a chance that you might fall ill for the rest of the election campaign – but maybe that would have sent an even more important message.

I had been advised to keep my mouth closed when I fell in, and my optician contacted me and said, you better take out your contact lenses just in case anything got into your eyes. So there was a serious health message.

The whole sewage campaign is very much about our environment, and there we were in the wonderful Lake District making the point that it’s just outrageous, that sewage being pumped there, but also the public health message.

I mean, lots of people do amazing outdoor sports, water, swimming, paddleboarding, and they are getting ill. It’s quite a fun image, but a very serious message about people’s health and the environment.

Have there been any injuries from the stunts so far?

No, the only thing at all was some grazed knees when I did the Army assault course. So, I grazed my knees a bit, but it’s hardly an injury.

I went along to the Lib Dem manifesto launch, and you talked about how social care is being put at the centre of the manifesto. You’ve been talking from your personal experience. Could you talk about the discussions that you’ve had with your family about taking that approach?

Well, I never used to do it. I kept all that private. I would campaign on issues related to my background, in the background, on cancer and on childhood bereavement. It was when I became leader that people started asking me questions, like they do all party leaders. And so that wasn’t too surprising.

But I sat down with Emily, my wife, and chatted it through. Part of my story goes back a long way to my mum and dad when I was a kid, and then my Nana, and they are no longer with us, sadly. So the real issue that Emily and I talked through was John, our son. We’ve tried to do it in a way which is trying to mirror the experience of other people.

So the whole thing is not about me. It’s about the fact that I’ve had these experiences, like many, many other people do, and particularly caring for John as a disabled child. I’ve met loads of constituents who are in relatively similar situations and I think the more we talked about it, we got a lot of people come contacting us and saying, I’m really pleased that you talked about that.

It meant something to me. So we increasingly realised we almost had a duty to talk about it. So, that move from not talking about it at all to trying to get comfortable talking about it in response to questions, to then seeing people feeling it was important to them.

And without being po-faced about it, when I look at the NHS, it becomes increasingly clear to me over many years talking to hospital people, GPs, and so on, that unless you sort out care, you’re not going to sort out the NHS. And while the social care bit is well thought-through – I’m particularly keen on our ideas, obviously – there’s the family carers, sometimes called unpaid carers, who do the vast bulk of the caring, and people just don’t bring them into the equation.

My experience with my mum, my nana, my grandmother, or my son is that it actually is the family is who do the bulk, and we need to support them better. If we supported them better, they would be able to be more sustained, and it would actually have a knock on beneficial thing to the health service. The very obvious thing that everyone talks about is discharging people from hospital.

If you have social care workers and care home places, but also families who are trained, got a bit of support, some respite care, relatively low-cost things, they can actually help free up beds in hospital. And for patients who it’s terrible for them being stuck in hospital, they don’t want to be there, it’s much better if they’re at home or in a care home.

And you generate really big savings in the NHS, but you also do the right thing. So it’s one of the reasons I’ve been passionate about it. It seems to me so obvious. And people just haven’t done it, and it’s partly because they haven’t quite understood what care means.

Did you manage to get any work done on that while you were in government? You were part of the coalition government for five years [between 2010 and 2015].

My focus was mainly on energy and climate change, so I wasn’t involved in care specifically. I did do a bit of work on employment law and care. But the people who did most of the work from the Liberal Democrats and these huge amounts were two people, Paul Burstow and Norman Lamb, and they were the driving force behind the Care Act of 2014.

The Care Act responded to the Dilnot Commission and was a very exciting way about how we would help pay for care in the future. It went through the House of Commons, it had lots of other good parts about it: assessments for carers, carers’ needs, because often carers needs haven’t been taken account of. So there were lots of things in this carer’s act.

Unfortunately the Conservatives, after 2015, didn’t implement some really important parts of that carers act. So we made some legal process, but it wasn’t followed on by the Conservatives afterwards. Some estimates suggest up to a million people would be getting care now, but they’re not because that law was not properly implemented.

What’s the best night out in Kingston and Surbiton, in your constituency?

Oh, that’s a good one. For me, there’s a range of restaurants by Kingston Bridge. You’ve got the back of Hampton Court, and it’s a really nice feeling, there’s quite buzz about it. So I think, having a meal on that sort of promenade, if you like, overlooking the Thames is, that’s quite nice. That’s lovely.

And which politician from a different party, would you most like to join you on your night out?

Oh, gosh! Who would I like to talk to? I think the person outside the party I most admired was Ken Clarke. So Ken Clarke was a Nottingham lad. He went to same school as I did, but 30 years or more before I went there. And he represents that part of the Conservative party, I think, sort of pro-European, reasonable, rational people who don’t have any truck with extremism.

I wouldn’t say Ken and I would agree on everything but I always found him engaging and fun. I mean, he loves his jazz.

Actually, on that on that same riff, Ed Balls. Ed was at Nottingham High School with me. He was the year below, and I lent him my A-level history notes and he never gave him back. But that’s another matter. I mean, it’d be quite nice to have a school reunion with three of us around the table. And I think we have quite a lot to chat about.

There’s plenty in the manifesto setting you apart from the Tories, but why would people vote Lib Dems over Labour?

My job as Lib Dem leader is to put forward our ideas. You went to the manifesto launch. You saw how we made health and social care and carers right at the heart of that. I think we’re the only party doing that, I think we’ve got the most ambitious credible program of any political party, and I want people to vote for us on our plans to rescue the NHS.

I mean, absolutely, I think our policies on the economy are quite strong. I mean, I’ve got degree in postgraduate economics. Economics is my thing, and I really think that we need to take the cost-of-living crisis far more seriously. There are families who are still struggling. We’ve got to get rid of the two-child benefit cap, for example. I mean, it’s having knock on effects on children’s education now. So cost of living issues are really important.

Getting the economy growing is absolutely fundamental, of course. That links to health, because we’ve got a lot of people who would get back to work, who would work more hours if they had health treatment, and were off the waiting list. So I see health and the economy as very closely related in a way that we probably haven’t seen in the past, but just the NHS is such a mess.

And then, you won’t be surprised to hear a Liberal Democrat say this, we need to trade more, and we need better trading relationships with our European colleagues, and we’ve been the only ones really pushing the boat out on that with a real clear plan about how we would reduce the costs, get rid of the red tape the Tories imposed, and get that trade relationship in the right place, and if we can do those sorts of things, I think it would be attractive to lots of people. We see lots of businesses really liking what we’re saying.

And obviously the third thing after health and the economy is our environmental campaigns, and we go back to falling into Windermere, and the whole sewage issue. I could add in climate change, of course, having done working government on that. Renewables, the revolution of getting cheap, clean energy where we have a massive opportunity, which hasn’t been fully taken under the Conservatives.

So yeah, I think people are looking at the Lib Dems liking our candidates, because in so many parts of the country only the Liberal Democrats can beat the Conservatives. So that’s one reason to vote for us, by the way, in large tracts of the Home Counties, the West Country, and so on, if you want to beat the Conservatives, you have to vote Liberal Democrat.

I like to think people like our values whether they’re on the health service, tackling child poverty, the environment, I hope people like our agenda but they also know the reality of first past the post electoral system. In so many areas, you need to vote Liberal Democrat to beat the Conservatives.

You mentioned Brexit. That’s another thing that comes up in the in the manifesto. Why are the Lib Dems aiming to rejoin the EU rather than just pursuing a softer Brexit like Labour’s trying to do?

The truth is, this is a long term project, because the Conservatives have so ruined our relationship, and it’s quite toxic, and it’s been poisoned by the Conservatives. And that’s really quite sad. Because it’s in our country’s interest, whether it’s on the economy, whether it’s on security, tackling crime, the environment, so many areas where there’s a mutual benefit.

We have a four-stage process for the next parliament, which would get us to position over the next parliament, where you could start being able to talk about the single market. And that will be a massive move. I think there’s a trade deal that can be done early and quickly that’s probably short of the single market.

There’s lots of ways in our four-stage approach, lots of other things you could do. The youth mobility scheme, for example, for 18 to 30s. I think there’s work on crime, particularly tackling these horrible crime gangs who traffic people. That’s one of the ways to stop the boats coming, so we can do a lot more work.

It’s difficult to put a time scale on it, because that relationship has got to be rebuilt and that will take time. And you know, Europe’s got its own issues. And we need to work with them to try to tackle those and you know, we can’t put a time scale it.

We realize it’s not going to happen very quickly. But we are a pro-European party. We’ve always said that back in the heart of Europe that’s ultimately where we need to be.

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