The leader of the UK's Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davey is no stranger to publicity stunts.  

Indeed, his team may sometimes wish he didn’t take the phrase quite so literally.

During this summer’s general election campaign, he repeatedly grabbed the headlines by providing the news media with eye-catching images of death-defying (or at least dignity-defying) activities. 

He tried paddleboarding, and delighted the assembled representatives of the press by repeatedly falling into the lake he was using to emphasize the dangers of water pollution. He later admitted that these multiple plunges may not have been entirely accidental. 

He turned his hand to wheelbarrow racing, swing and zumba dancing, aqua-aerobics, tightrope-walking, and bungee-jumping.

He drove a tractor, attempted surfing, and launched his party’s manifesto at a theme park.

In doing so, he took a leaf out of the book of that brilliant campaigner – yes, brilliant campaigner, but terrible premier and awful person – Boris Johnson.

Johnson had of course, while Mayor of London, famously got stuck on a zip wire six meters in the air while forlornly waving a pair of small union flags during 2012’s Olympic Games. It was perhaps less glamorous than Tom Cruise abseiling into the Parisian stadium this summer, but it was possibly more memorable. 

Like the blond bombshell before him, Ed Davey brought to the campaign a sense of fun. He was clearly enjoying himself and not taking himself too seriously. He provided a refreshing contrast from the dull optics offered by the other party leaders.

Like Johnson – and like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump – he was interesting to watch. And so the media watched him.

But – certainly unlike Farage and Trump – he also showed a great willingness to laugh at himself. And that made the press and the public come to rather like him.

He felt like Mr. Feelgood.

And that, of course, helped him get his party’s messages across.

Those messages proved pretty straightforward and focused for the most part on improving public investment in healthcare and social care. Mr. Davey gave a relatable human face to those profoundly serious issues.

Alongside the careful targeting of its resources (and in-person appearances by its likeable leader) to key constituencies, this was a strategy which proved remarkably successful for the Liberal Democrats’ affable action man.

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This year, his party took 72 seats in the House of Commons. That was the highest number of MPs it had ever achieved. In its previous incarnation – as the Liberal Party – it had last exceeded that tally more than a century ago – in 1923. 

At the previous general election, in 2019, the Liberal Democrat presence in the UK parliament had been reduced to 11 seats.

Even given the extraordinary unpopularity at this year’s election of the Conservative Party – whose parliamentary presence shrunk to an all-time low of 121 seats, fewer than a third of those won in 2019 – this looked like something of a miracle.

Ed Davey had made the art of politics look as easy as falling off a log. Into a lake.

It should therefore have come as no surprise that he chose this month to arrive at his party’s annual conference in the seaside resort of Brighton on a jet ski.

It wasn’t quite that he could walk on water, but this was Sir Ed looking like the noble knight of yore on his trusty steed. This was politics in the style of James Bond. 

And this time he didn’t fall off.

And, because he now had the attention of the nation, he no longer had any need to fall off.

It should have come as no surprise then that at that conference he promised his modestly ecstatic supporters that he would cut through the “doom and gloom” and the “pessimism and defeatism” offered by the new Labour government trying desperately to move beyond the social and economic crises left in the wake of fourteen years of right-wing rule.

He hardly even needed to berate the new Prime Minister for taking many tens of thousands of pounds in free designer clothes, spectacles and corporate hospitality from wealthy donors while targeting pensioners with unpopular austerity measures. 

But the new confidence found by the Liberal Democrats hasn’t of course been shared in recent months by all of their counterparts on the opposition benches.

As Sir Ed’s colleagues have relished the joys of their minor renaissance, the Conservatives have been licking their latest wounds and reopening older ones in their quest to select their own new leader.

Of the party’s six initial nominees – two of whom have already been voted out by their honorable friends – the four surviving candidates are pitching to the Tory faithful at their conference this week.

They will then be whittled down by MPs to a final two who’ll go to a ballot of party members, which will close (appropriately enough) at Halloween.  

A couple of days later their ghoulish new boss will be unveiled – the last one standing among a group described by Reform UK’s Nigel Farage as a bunch of “nobodies” who “have no idea how loathed they are”. 

Many grassroots Tory members will be hoping to break free from the ongoing horrors that have been brought by their party’s lurch to the Right over the past few years – and will agree with former Conservative Prime Minister John Major that their party needs to regain the center ground and ditch extremist policies which he himself, in the run-up to their conference, described as un-British, odious and unconscionable.

But, regardless of their ideological affiliations, most of those members are surely hoping that their new leader will find a way to put an end to their party’s fractious bouts of in-fighting, and that she or he will, like Ed Davey, discover rather more productive ways to rock the political boat – without capsizing it or trying to stop it.