At Prime Minister’s Questions the other week, Ed Davey mildly chided Sir Keir for whipping his MPs on a privileges committee vote, before turning around to accuse other opposition parties of hypocrisy for proposing the measure in the first place. During another debate on the same subject, he gently beseeched the Prime Minister to be the best version of himself. In recent interviews, including one on Monday with ITN, Davey has spoken of Sir Keir as a tragic hero who has betrayed his own high ideals. The Lib Dems’ recent local election campaign was less about opposing the government than guarding against what Davey called the ‘extreme populists’: Reform and the Greens.

Watching these displays I am reminded of another party called the Liberal Democrats – the Russian one, which was led by the colourful figure of Vladimir Zhirinovsky until his death in 2022. The job of Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic party was to provide a fake opposition to Vladimir Putin’s government. He took all of Putin’s ideas for granted, sometimes elaborating on them in a cartoonish way, and only ever criticised the government for not living up to them. Bizarre outfits like these are a plank of what is now termed managed or sovereign democracy in Russia. 

The occasional tiff aside, Davey agrees with Starmer on nearly everything and almost always casts his ‘opposition’ in the form of........

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