Could it be magic for Lib Dems’ Umunna in Watford?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/25/could-it-be-magic-for-lib-dems-umunna-in-watford

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After a Harry Potter studio tour, there’s more fantasy at foreign policy event at Vicarage Road

To the hospitality lounge at Watford Football Club, where the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Chuka Umunna took the stage to announce solemnly: “This is a fitting moment to say something about what the Liberal Democrat approach would be to the international rules-based order in the next parliament.”

Is it though? As usual with election events, the location appeared randomly matched with the subject matter. For whatever reason, we were discussing foreign policy at Vicarage Road. If you’re thinking that we might as well have been discussing how to escape the Premier League basement at Chatham House, you’re doing this wrong. Just relax. Allow the experience to wash over you like the rain that would set in as we headed out to canvass in Watford. More on that somewhat mixed bag later.

For now, please avoid drawing any unfortunate parallels between the Lib Dems and Watford, who are having something of a shocker, and are yet to win at home this season. Thanking their hosts at the club, Umunna went as far as: “We share some of the same colours.” Well, Watford are half red. It’s not all yellow. Speaking of which, the coveted Chris Martin endorsement dropped in at the weekend, with the Coldplay frontman declaring he would “probably vote Liberal Democrat”. More bad news for Jo Swinson? Or do you really only hit the panic button when Ed Sheeran commits?

No clarity on that yet, with Umunna’s keynote focusing instead on global challenges, nationalist populism, and the threats to liberal democracy. Huge and vital subjects – and yet it is hard to escape the sense that there is something Pooterish about the Lib Dems. The advance press material announced that the Umunna speech would be taking place “ahead of the Nato summit”. In sequencing and significance terms, this is akin to me announcing that I will be making another keynote speech about not playing football in the house “ahead of the Nato summit”. In my head, this speech will be summit-critical, but I have to accept the wider view that the gathering could probably go ahead without it, just as it will probably do without a Lib Dem intervention on hybrid warfare.

By chance, your correspondent had spent Sunday a couple of miles away at the Harry Potter studio tour at Leavesden Studios, and this felt rather like being back in Watford for an even more magical piece of fantasy. That’s the one where the Liberal Democrats are meaningfully demanding Nato reform, albeit as the Vicarage Road groundsmen could be seen conducting a pitch inspection through the glass behind. Accio three points. Though will settle for one.

Indications are that the Lib Dems are doing a bit of settling too. Having come out of the traps for this election informing everyone that Jo Swinson was a potential prime minister, the party is now pushing a rather revised line. “What is absolutely clear,” Umunna claimed, “is that the Liberal Democrats have a very decisive role to play on December 12th.”

Only time will show. Today, we had journeyed from Westminster to Watford on the Swinson-plastered battlebus, which is very much the tour bus of a band struggling with the realisation that they’re never going to play the Downing Street enormodome. But actually that’s maybe, you know, a blessing, and a really beautiful thing, because not being an arena outfit offers so much more intimate and profound a connection with the fans.

Smash cut to a Watford doorstep, an hour after the rules-based international order speech, where the rain was pouring down and a gentleman was explaining to Umunna: “If we’d have voted for you in 1969, we’d have lost all our weapons.”

“Well I’m not sure that’s right …” countered Umunna.

“Although I was watching the TV and the lady …”

“Our leader, Jo Swinson …”

“She wasn’t trying to get rid of the submarines, so there is a bit of change. But the liberals have always been against armament. Anyway, I voted Brexit.”

Elsewhere, there was much better luck with an NHS worker who’d voted Lib Dem locally, and seemed set to take the plunge nationally next month, along with his partner. But weariness was the order of the day. “Like most people I am exhausted with it,” one resident opined of this general election. “I turn off the news.” One of the politics-is-broken crowd on whom the Lib Dems can count? “I want to get Brexit done, so you can imagine who I’m voting for.”

Ah. And thereafter, there was much talk of potholes and police numbers, suggesting that while the rules-based international order will one day be a doorstep issue, today was decidedly not that day.