Lib Dem Treasury Spokesman Quits to Try to Unseat Davey
Charlie Maynard, the party’s Treasury spokesman and MP for Witney, has resigned from the frontbench and wants Sir Ed Davey replaced. It is the second frontbench departure in a week, after the care and carers spokesperson Alison Bennett four days earlier. The deputy leader says most MPs are “furious at this distraction”.
Daisy Cooper’s defence is that the arithmetic is not there and the timing is self-harming: “The vast majority of our MPs support Ed, want him to lead the party into the next election, and are furious at this distraction,” adding that “we are the last line of defence against a Reform UK government”. The former leader Tim Farron was blunter: “To think we’re helped by this kind of rubbish, you’d need to be smoking the kind of stuff even we aren’t in favour of legalising.” On the other side, Julian Brazil, who leads Devon county council, says Mr Maynard has “put his head above the parapet — we’ll see if other people follow”, and that while Sir Ed has been “a fantastic leader” the job is “best done by someone else”. The mechanics make a challenge hard rather than impossible. A contest requires a no-confidence vote passed by a majority of all the party’s MPs; a candidate then needs nominations from a tenth of the parliamentary party plus two hundred members across at least twenty local parties. Sir Ed led the party to seventy-two seats in 2024, its best result in more than a century, and holds seventy-one now. He has been leader since 2020, acting from 2019. The context is a week in which a Green leader nearly took a Labour seat and the Liberal Democrats were largely absent from the argument.