The Liberal Democrats won 72 seats at the 2024 general election, their best result since 1923, on 12.2 per cent of the vote, barely above the 11.5 per cent that won them eleven seats in 2019. That near-sixfold jump in seats on an almost flat share came from ruthless targeting: pouring resources into around forty constituencies, leaning on tactical-voting appeals and the Conservative collapse across southern England, and building a media campaign around Ed Davey's paddleboards and bungee jumps.

The 2024 manifesto set out a programme of structural reform more sweeping than anything Labour or the Conservatives proposed: proportional representation for the Commons, a staged path back to EU membership beginning with single-market accession, net zero by 2045 (five years ahead of Labour), free personal care in England, 380,000 homes a year, votes at 16, an elected House of Lords, and a rebuilt water regulator. Twenty-three months on, the party has not broken any of it. It has simply stopped arguing for most of it.

Proportional representation, its oldest cause, has been raised by backbenchers rather than pressed by the leadership. On Europe, the manifesto's staged return to membership has been left largely to Labour's more limited reset; the party has said little in public about rejoining. Its 2045 net zero target, more ambitious than Labour's, has not been made a campaign theme, with Labour setting the terms of the clean-power argument and the Greens pressing from the left. On housing, its 380,000-homes pledge is higher than Labour's 300,000 target, and Labour is falling well short of that; the Liberal Democrats have not turned the gap into an argument.

What the party has campaigned on, relentlessly and effectively, is water. Sewage discharges, water-company performance and regulator reform are now permanent political questions largely because the Liberal Democrats made them so. Davey has framed the fix as tougher regulation rather than public ownership, arguing that nationalisation "would be letting the water companies off the hook" and pressing instead for a new Clean Water Authority to take over Ofwat's powers. It is a real achievement, and it has also come to define the party's public identity as a single-issue voice on environmental regulation rather than the structural-reform party the manifesto set out. The largest Liberal Democrat parliamentary group in a century has been used to press the government on sewage compliance more than to argue for a new voting system, single-market membership or 380,000 homes.

The local record is stronger. In the 2025 local elections the party came second behind Reform UK and took control of Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and Shropshire, and it now holds more than three thousand council seats. That growth is real and locally rooted. The parliamentary position is more fragile: the 72 seats rested on an anti-Conservative wave, and while the Conservatives have fallen further since, Reform is now contesting many of the same places.

Some of the quiet is defensible. PR is a hard sell to voters who have just benefited from first past the post; free personal care implies tax rises the party would rather not spell out; EU rejoin is unpopular in several of the seats the party now holds. But some of it is a choice, and the choice has a cost: a party that will not campaign on its most distinctive commitments starts to look defined by what it avoids. The test before 2029 is whether a party holding 72 seats and more than three thousand councillors uses that base to argue for what the manifesto promised, proportional representation, single-market membership, 380,000 homes a year, or defends it by staying quiet while Reform moves into the same southern seats it took from the Conservatives.