The Hypocrisy of Ed Davey

Social care advocacy should go hand-in-hand with pro-life policy

NOTE: apologies for a bit of a gap since my last post—it has been a busy time! I hope to be back to my regular almost-weekly rhythm again.

Welcome to new subscribers! If you were brought here by my “Raise Against the Machine” series, I reassure you that it is still indefinitely ongoing, but with a general election in the UK at the minute there’s plenty else to discuss for a little while!

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It seems there’s only one person who’s had a good couple of weeks in the circus of the UK General Election: Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Whilst Rishi Sunak has been trying to recover from his politically catastrophic decision to bow out early from D-Day commemorations, and Sir Keir Starmer has been letting him get on with like Jigsaw from Saw watching a man cut off his own foot with a hacksaw in the name of “survival”, Sir Ed has been having a whale of a time. It seems like the Lib Dems have decided that Davey himself is their best asset for this campaign. It’s all about Ed.

First, he decided that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much so worth doing as simply messing about on paddleboards. Then, he threw himself with gusto down a giant inflatable water slide. Then, it was drumming an exercise ball between his legs in an old folks’ home. Until Nigel Farage came bursting back onto the scene last Monday, Davey was the most entertaining thing about an otherwise uninspiring election contest.

Davey is my local MP, and so I must confess to feeling a slight surge of excitement and fellow feeling whenever I see him pop up in the national media, despite the fact I’d never vote for him. All told, he’s not a bad local MP, which is one of the things that has held him in good stead here in Kingston and Surbiton, which is always relatively closely contested between the Lib Dems and the Tories (Davey was actually briefly ousted from 2015-2017 due to a post-coalition backlash). 

Last week though, Mission Ed took a serious turn (perhaps intentionally so). The Lib Dems released a video promoting their proposed reforms to UK social care. It was no compilation of emotive music, earnest narration, and B-roll however; it was an intimate and emotional interview with Davey, as he spoke nursing his terminally ill mother as a teenager, revisited his childhood home, and discussed his teenage 16 year old son John, who has profound disabilities and requires 24/7 care. In an accompanying interview with ITV, he asked “Who will look after him when I’m gone?”

These videos struck a chord across the political spectrum—they were refreshingly unpolitical. It did a lot both for the cause of social care reform (on which it is largely agreed that long-term cross-party collaboration is needed, and with which the Lib Dems have headlined today’s manifesto announcement), as well as for Davey’s personal stock. To see a political leader in tears as he speaks lovingly about his disabled son was a beautiful thing.

Curiously, there are a few other examples of high-profile politicians with disabled children, and these came to mind for me. It is often forgotten that David Cameron’s first child, Ivan, suffered from a rare condition called Ohtahara syndrome, and died in 2009, aged six, the year before Cameron became Prime Minister.  A more famous example is Charles de Gaulle’s daughter Anne, who had Down’s syndrome and died of pneumonia aged just 20. 

There is a great draw in seeing powerful men humbling themselves to care for the least of these. Often, it’s done as a cynical PR stunt, but when it’s their own children, it’s hard to question their sincerity.

But that is precisely why I was profoundly unsettled by Davey’s comments last week, and find myself riled by the prominent place he is giving social care in his policy offering.

I do not, for a moment, doubt his sincere commitment to social care for the elderly and disabled. But I find them bafflingly at odds with the Lib Dems’ stances on abortion and euthanasia—to the extent that I cannot regard Davey as anything other than a startling hypocrite.