Multiple times throughout the interview Sir Ed Davey accidentally turned his Zoom camera off. He’d hastily apologise and search to turn it back on. His daughter, and later her cat, entered the room mid-interview, but only the cat was allowed to join us, resting her head on Davey’s shoulder. By the end of our conversation, it’s very clear that Davey is not a polished politician, nor does he wish to be.

Leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third largest Parliamentary party in the UK, Davey markets himself as a “centrist dad” of “middle England”. Spending his undergraduate years at the University of Oxford, studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Jesus College, Davey speaks of Oxford with the faint glint in his eye so common amongst Oxford alumni. He admits with a chuckle that he came to Oxford completely unprepared after his gap year, having done no pre-reading: “I had one sleepless night thinking I’d gone to the wrong university.” Having never studied the subject before, he felt “totally at sea” with the economics papers of his course. Despite this, he threw himself headfirst into the myriad of activities Oxford has to offer: serving as JCR president, taking part in amateur dramatics (at which he was “absolutely hopeless”), and getting involved with the Oxford Ecology Movement. But as many of us will likely later reflect, he says “I wish I’d done even more”. 

Oxford was also the site of his “first major political engagement”. As Jesus JCR president during the 1987 General Election, Davey joined the ‘Tactical Voting ‘87’ campaign, which aimed to keep the Tories out of power in Oxford. Yet, despite his early political activism, and his PPE degree, a career in politics was never on the cards for Davey. His initial desire was to work in development in the global South, having had relatives involved with the World Health Organisation, the European Commission, and even Tiger Conservation. Ultimately, he applied for the role of Parliamentary Economics Researcher at what was then the Social and Liberal Democrat Party, driven by his interest in economics. This decision has undeniably shaped his life in a way he might never have imagined. At the time the party was polling at just 4% under leader Paddy Ashdown, and Davey confesses that “they only really employed me because they couldn’t afford anyone else”. 

Within a month, he had joined the party as a member. Davey describes being “totally inspired by Paddy, and his espousal liberalism” and he continued to work with the party through the 1992 General Election. Despite a momentary dalliance in management consultancy (about which his only comment was distaste for his boss), his “bug” for politics dragged him back. Standing in the 1997 General Election as the Lib Dem candidate for Kingston and Surbiton, in South West London, “more as a have-a-go than anything else”, he was elected with a 56 vote majority. Davey reflects on his entrance into politics as a move of coincidence, and seems to believe fate was on his side at that moment: “I sort of fell into politics…it wasn’t a plan, it was a whole set of circumstances, and I ended up happily in a party that I feel is a classic liberal party, and liberalism is who I am.”

Our conversation moves to an emotive issue for Davey, one which has played a significant role throughout his life: care. Davey cared for his terminally ill mother in his early teenage years, then his grandmother, and today his severely disabled son. He admits that it’s a very personal issue and one that has only entered the public sphere of his life recently: “Only when you become leader do you become more open to questions about who you are.” He reflects that he’s “gone on a journey since becoming leader in 2020”, not only speaking about it more publicly, but also engaging with it more deeply on a personal level. His book, Why I Care: And why care matters (published in May 2025) is part manifesto, part introspection – his way of reflecting on his experiences. I ask Davey how care has played a role in who he is today, and he points to the work of Saul Becker, a renowned social scientist. Becker identifies three characteristics common in young carers: resilience, empathy, and time management skills – all of which Davey relates to from his time as a young carer. “You have to really get things done, smartly. You can’t mess about.” 

Being a carer has, unsurprisingly, also informed his politics. He refers to the millions of family carers in the UK, and how “governments, councils, and public policy just don’t factor these people in”. He argues it would be “transformative…if we did care properly”; benefiting the economy, the health service, and general national happiness. 

It’s a frustration he knows well from his years on the backbenches – watching policy fall short whilst being powerless to change it. That changed in 2010, when the Liberal Democrats found themselves with an unexpected opportunity to govern.

The movement from opposition to government was life-altering for a backbench MP like Davey. For the Liberal Democrats, it proved to be a once in a lifetime opportunity. After the 2010 General Election gave no overall parliamentary majority to a single party, an infamous five days of negotiations ensued, culminating with the Lib Dems entering into a formal coalition with the Tories. “I was actually arguing for a coalition with Labour…but we ended up extracting a lot more from the Conservatives in the coalition deal than I had possibly expected.” 

He describes his appointment to the role of Junior Minister at the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills as “exciting…if very unexpected”, and reflects proudly on his work to deliver shared parental leave that “ensured the labour market was fairer to women”. It was his promotion to Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, however, that excited him most, and he visibly lights up as we begin to talk about it. “It was just brilliant…we essentially created the offshore wind industry as a result of what we did.” Holding the role for three and a half years, Davey became the longest serving Energy Minister since the early 1980s. “At the time, I was convinced I wouldn’t be a minister again, and I thought ‘I just have to work as hard as I possibly can, score as many goals as I can’.” He attributes all of his successes to “a fantastic civil service”, and makes clear his outright distaste for the right-wing’s undermining of the organisation’s credibility, a clear reference to Dominic Cummings’ “blob” label for the service. 

When I ask him to reflect on these coalition years over a decade on, he’s remarkably more positive than I, perhaps naively, expected. “We achieved an awful lot – taking the lowest paid out of tax [brackets], getting investment in mental health services, keeping us in the NHS.” He admits, “politically, it didn’t go very well for us”, with the party losing nearly 40 seats, Davey’s included, but “we showed a) what Liberal Democrats can do in power, and b) that coalitions can work, and be stable”. If anything, Davey thinks the coalition acts as “a great argument for electoral reform”. “I know lots of people don’t like it…but for the country, I think it was the most stable government we’ve had in a long time”, pointing to the five Prime Ministers the UK has had in the span of less than ten years. “They’ve had big majorities, and they’ve been completely unstable, divided, frankly hopeless.” 

Despite his distaste for the First Past the Post electoral system, it’s undeniable that Davey has benefited from it. His pride in his party is undeniable, and when I ask what he brings to it, I get a single word answer: “Winning.” He admits he is bragging, but “winning is rather important in politics”. The three elections before 2024 gave the Lib Dems a respective eight, twelve, and eleven seats. With Ed Davey as leader, the 2024 General Election saw them win 72 – their best result since 1923. When I mention the recent polling, that has seen his party at just 12%, he quickly dismisses their value. “People often think about politics like we have proportional representation (PR).” In reality, it’s about vote concentration in a specific geographic area, not about the lateral spread of popularity across the country. “I look at whether we are winning.”

One thing that voters definitely know Davey for is his outrageous stunts, and when I mention them, I see a smile light up his face again: “It’s really challenging for us to get media coverage…partly because we are sensible – we don’t say crazy things, we don’t say extremist things.” It’s true that a lot of the nuanced points Davey tries to make about care and EU relations simply aren’t compatible with the clickbait media culture of today. But the reasoning for the stunts runs deeper than chasing journalists. He sees an emotional deficit at the heart of liberal politics: “People who have our liberal views…tend not to do emotion very well.” The data and analysis, he admits, are well-covered – but “if you don’t have the emotional element to what you are doing, you just don’t connect with people”. He posits this as the reason for the success of the Right, saying “Johnson, Farage, Trump, they are much better at emotions, but these emotions are often nasty emotions”. It’s a gap that’s only widened on social media where, he admits, “we have been too slow in getting our social media team together, making it a priority, and coming across well”.

It’s the question of emotion in politics that leads us, naturally, to Brexit. His time spent negotiating with the EU as a minister convinced him of the value of the supranational organisation. For Davey, “Brexit is just a total disaster…we have lost so much”, but trying to get the public to engage with it again is proving to be difficult. “It divided people, divided the country, friends, families, neighbours, work colleagues, in quite an emotional way.” As such, “even the most strongly ‘remain’ people…often don’t want to talk about it…they just have this memory of it all being a nightmare”. 

Davey is unambiguous about the party’s mission: to stop “Trump’s America coming to Farage’s Britain”. It is here where Davey’s passion is most clear to me. His smile and composure leaves him, and I see the anger beneath at the growing popularity of the Reform Party, a party he fiercely condemns as “a danger, an absolute danger”. Davey draws parallels between Trump’s protectionist tariffs and Farage’s pioneering of Brexit: “Like Trump, Farage doesn’t really believe in free trade. He wants to stop us from trading with our European neighbours.” Davey argues that, under Farage, Britain’s foreign policy would be centred on courting the favour of Trump and Putin, rather than the UK’s national interests. “The authoritarianism, anti-democratic behaviour of America goes against British values”, and, as such, he explains, Farage is “a real threat to our future”. 

It’s clear this is a man who still has plenty to fight for. But I turn our conversation away from the future, and towards the past – and the regrets that inevitably come from such a long career in politics. When I ask Davey how he handles his regrets, he has a simple philosophy, but arguably one that would not stand up to scrutiny from the public. “You learn from it, don’t you?… Inevitably you make mistakes…often it is better to go with your instincts.” Particularly when he first started as a minister, Davey felt there was “so much to learn”, so many processes to comprehend and utilise for his own agenda. 

Any life after politics will likely be defined by his family and “what I like doing – going for walks, good food, travelling”. But, for now, he certainly has ambitions that will drive him for decades to come, and is genuinely reluctant to imagine taking a step back from politics: “It’s too exciting at the moment…. When I talk to colleagues and party members, I often say we have a moral responsibility to stop reform, and an historic opportunity to win many more seats.” For a man who fell into politics by accident, he seems in no hurry to find his way back out.

Christina Lamb started her career as the Cold War was ending. She saw the fall of dictatorships in eastern Europe and Latin America, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. “It felt like things were going in the right direction”, Lamb tells me. But in all her 38 years as a foreign correspondent covering countless conflicts –  from Libya and Iraq, to Afghanistan and Sudan – “the last few years have been the busiest”. Reflecting on Ukraine, she said: “I never imagined that I would be covering major land war in Europe.”

Lamb always had a passion for storytelling. She came to the University of Oxford in 1983 to study Chemistry at University College, a course “which I hated”. Smiling over her menu at the Queen’s Lane cafe, Lamb tells me that, initially, she was unable to change subjects, “but after the first year exams they were quite happy for me to switch”. 

Cherwell was a big part of Lamb’s time at Oxford. She edited Arts and News before becoming the paper’s Editor-in-Chief. Lamb initially wanted to switch to Philosophy, Physiology, and Psychology (PPP), but her tutors presented her with an ultimatum: she could switch to PPP, but only if she stopped her work at Cherwell. “It seemed wrong”, Lamb says. “Part of [going to] University is doing other things and I didn’t see why I should have to give it up.” So she changed to Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) instead. “PPE didn’t care that I was doing Cherwell.” I’m sure our current editor can attest to this.

Of her own admission, “I didn’t know anything about journalism when I came here. I was always interested in stories but not really the news”. But an invite to Cherwell’s infamous cheese and wine parties (an event of the 1980s which I personally believe should be revived) introduced her to the student paper. “Different editors spoke and talked about what they did. I thought ‘I really like writing and I’m really curious about people’ so it seemed like something that I wanted to do.”

When I meet with Lamb she is visiting Oxford to receive an honorary Doctorate of Letters as part of a special ceremony to mark the Chancellor’s first year in office. Lamb was the first in her family to attend University, so, for her, attending Oxford was “already very special”, and when she was contacted about an honorary degree she was “astonished”.

Lamb gave me a snippet of her recent travels before returning to Oxford. “My life’s kind of crazy”, she says. In the weeks before the ceremony she had been reporting from Iran, Ukraine, and the Chad-Sudan border. It was whilst reporting in Ukraine, only a few days ago, that she realised she didn’t have anything to wear to the ceremony’s black-tie dinner.

But, as luck would have it, she was returning to her car in Kyiv after visiting Maidan Nezalezhnosti (also known as Independence Square) when she spotted a green dress in a shop window. “Within ten minutes I bought it”, she says, “but it felt very odd because I’m in a war zone carrying all my body armour but now I’m also carrying this designer dress”. Such is the life of a busy foreign correspondent.

Reflecting on what the honorary doctorate meant to her, Lamb tells me “sometimes you feel like ‘what’s the point of doing this?’ You’re taking a lot of risks, putting other people at risk, and it doesn’t feel [like] you’re making a difference.” So, for Lamb, Lord Hague’s recognition of her work was “particularly special. It was kind of recognising all of those people that I write about – that it meant something”.

When Lamb first graduated she thought she was going to be a novelist: “My plan was to spend a couple of years doing journalism, preferably abroad, so I could have some adventures and make a bit of money. I wanted to rent a garret where I could write my novels.” But what started as a weekend invite to a wedding in Pakistan became the beginning of a life-long career.

Lamb fell in love with Pakistan and moved to Peshawar, near the Afghan border. Several newspaper editors said they would be interested in articles featuring Afghanistan, which was under Soviet occupation at the time. The conflict was covered mainly “by freelancers because it was considered too dangerous to be done by staff”.

She quickly learnt that Afghans are amazing storytellers. “So many of the people that I met were totally illiterate, but they have this great oral tradition.” Lamb said she was “fascinated and I thought, ‘I can’t actually make up stories like this – these are really interesting’. I’ve been a journalist ever since, telling other people’s stories. I feel very lucky”. Lamb has visited Afghanistan dozens of times since, earning a reputation for her focus on the effects of war on women and the use of rape as a weapon. 

Initially she didn’t think she was doing anything differently. But, after a while, she became more conscious that, in her words, “there weren’t many people writing about women”. She wondered “why is the paper only full of pictures of men? Why aren’t we writing about women? They’re half of the population and actually in a lot of these war zones they are the ones trying to protect and educate children. We should be writing about what happens to them”.

She tells me that she feels “heartbroken about what’s happened in Afghanistan”. For Lamb, the withdrawal of Western troops in 2021 was inevitable, but “it was the way that it was done, so precipitously” which was problematic. “It will be five years this summer since the Taliban took over… I don’t hear anybody talking about Afghanistan and I find that difficult to understand”.

Life in Lamb’s field isn’t easy. “I basically see the best and worst of humanity.” But, she remarks, “in most places you find really inspiring people.” For Lamb, Ukraine is no exception. “Ukrainians get annoyed about this now”, she says, “because everyone goes on about the resilience of Ukrainians. It’s probably irritating for them. But it is true”.

During Lamb’s most recent visit to the war-torn nation, the temperature hit a staggering -21 degrees celsius. But in a country where “a lot of people don’t have electricity”, people “want to show that they’re having a normal life”. Lamb described busy restaurants, theatres, and discos.

Unlike much war reporting, Lamb’s work often focuses on life away from the frontline. In Ukraine this is partly because “you can’t go anywhere near the frontline now because of the drones”. But in general, Lamb is keen to emphasise that war isn’t all about combat: “People often think there’s war and everything stops. But in fact people still go to work, get married, have babies, and go to school. All of that still happens.”

Our meeting coincides with the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and I was keen to hear Lamb’s thoughts on how things have changed. “Four years is a long time”, she remarked, “people are very tired. Every night there’s air raid sirens and your sleep is constantly broken”. She added that “people don’t particularly see an end” to the war. “Nobody believes that Putin has any interest in peace.”

Setting her teacup down gently, Lamb’s expression became particularly serious. She emphasises that “the nature of war has changed enormously which is something I think people don’t necessarily understand. They’re still thinking of how war used to be with tanks and guns, and it’s not. It’s a totally high tech drone war”.

Although the trenches which stretch along the frontline make it “kind of look like the First World War”, there are also “people sitting there with joysticks, almost like a computer game. It’s just very different. It’s how warfare will probably be in the future. We’ll have a lot to learn from Ukraine and it’s changing all the time”.

Whilst Lamb describes Ukraine as “extremely different” to any war that she’s covered before, some things don’t change. “Like most of these wars”, Lamb tells me, “women and children are often the victims”, and Ukraine is no different. She says that “we have seen Russians using rape as a weapon” and “domestic abuse increasing because a lot of the men fighting are often traumatised and sometimes take that out on their loved ones.

“Even if the war were to end today, which would be wonderful, there’s so much destruction and trauma. Nobody really knows what it will have done to the children to have gone through this. It’s hard to be very positive.”

With the conflict entering its fifth year, I was interested in how Lamb keeps stories like Ukraine alive. As she laments, “most of what I write is very depressing. You can’t keep endlessly depressing people or outraging people”. 

So what do you do? Lamb admits that “it isn’t easy”, but “that’s our job, to find ways to make people interested”. Throughout her career Lamb always used to think of her mum as her reader “because she was somebody who didn’t know that much about the world. So I would think ‘is this something that would interest her, make her read something?’ Why should she care about Afghanistan, for example?”.

In order to keep stories alive, Lamb tries to approach them from different angles. When writing about Gaza, she got in touch with Gazan students who held offers to study at UK universities. “We sort of campaigned for them”, she said. “I went and spoke to some of them and it was a good way of writing about what was going on… if I’d just written a story about the horrors of Gaza some people might have just switched off.”

We live in an unprecedented era of conflict. There’s never been so much fighting this side of the Second World War. So I was also interested in how Lamb chooses which conflicts to cover and which stories to tell. “Sometimes something happens and so we sort of have to go. If someone’s just invaded a country or something – then it’s just reacting”, she says. 

Other times, “like with Sudan, we haven’t reported on something for ages so it’s good to go there and see what’s happening. I feel like that about the West Bank at the moment. I’ll probably go there fairly soon because there’s been all this focus on Gaza, but the situation in the West Bank is also shocking. I went and did something maybe 18 months ago but it’s been a while now and it’s gotten worse”.

One of the many things that Lamb has learned over the past 38 years is to “never go anywhere thinking that I know what the story is”. 

Of course, sometimes “people will say ‘where are you going? What’s the story?’”, but “I always think when you get on the ground, it’s there that you know”. Fortunately, Lamb reflects, “my editor is very supportive”. But she notes that that’s not always been the case. “I’ve had struggles in the past”, she says, “when I started there were very few women doing what I do”.

Reflecting on her career and the changing dynamics in global politics, for her, “it does feel like a different time”. She notes that “things that we’ve been used to – assuming that the United States was our trusted ally – we can no longer assume”. She describes being “at the mercy” of the White House with few people having any idea of what’s coming next.

“Sadly we’re seeing a lot more autocracy, a lot of democracy being rolled back”, she says. “It doesn’t feel like the world is in a good place.” But despite these turbulent times, Lamb emphasises the importance of having “confidence in doing what you believe in”, telling me we shouldn’t be “pushed into things because you feel that’s what society expects of you”. 

With a nod to her own journey, she remarks: “I just really believed that I could write and that I would find interesting people to write about. Everybody has a story. It’s just a matter of having the patience to sit and listen, to care.”