BOURNEMOUTH, England — Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is winning the battle for attention as Westminster takes its populist message and opinion poll lead seriously.

Britain’s Liberal Democrats, the country’s centrist third party, have something to say about that.

At the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth on the southwest coast of England this week, the Lib Dems’ top brass have wrapped themselves in the Union Flag and positioned themselves as the “positive patriots” who can stop Reform sweeping to power at the next general election.

Ed Davey, the party’s leader, claimed Farage wants to get rid of the NHS, destroy the countryside and roll back gun laws in his conference speech on Tuesday.

“That is Trump’s America. Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain,” he said.

The party claims to have a four-year plan to win as many seats as possible at the next election, believing their path to victory is paved on gobbling up votes from their former coalition partners, the Conservatives.

They think they can offer a home for voters who view the spiky rhetoric of mainstream politics as unseemly.

Oh, be nice!

The Liberal Democrats won an unprecedented 72 seats in the general election, becoming the largest third party in British politics in over 100 years — a fact they say has not been reflected in the media.

The party has relied on stunts to attract the attention of Westminster’s traveling political reporters. Over the course of the weekend, the party’s leadership did some flower arranging, beekeeping, joined a marching band, played mini golf, dabbled in cricket on the beach and went for a morning swim in the sea.

“I do think Ed’s stunts have been wildly successful because he’s a fun-loving dad, but we know that they work because we tag a serious message onto these things,” said one senior Lib Dem MP, granted anonymity like others in this piece to speak about strategy.

“The vibes are important. Being positive patriots, being happy and having fun, I think really matters.”

But the Lib Dems have also tried to push a more serious message of respectability, claiming they can be a home for voters dismayed by what they see as increasingly inflammatory language.

The Lib Dems are the only party “representing the views and values of Britain’s decent silent majority,” Davey claimed.

One senior Lib Dem strategist said the party should be able to pull together a coalition of former Tories who think “Mr. Farage isn’t quite cricket,” as well as attracting those further to the left of British politics who feel the Labour Party — which has tacked to the right on issues including migration and welfare — does not speak for them.

Bunting Britain

At previous Liberal Democrat conferences, you would be more likely to see an EU flag draped around activists’ shoulders in protest at Brexit than either the Union Flag or the St. George’s Cross. Yet, on Saturday night, the conference hall in Bournemouth was full of red, white and blue flag-waving — as former party leader Tim Farron proclaimed: “We will not have our history, our heritage, and our home stolen by the poison of nationalism.”

Farron insisted there was “nothing even remotely contrived” about the conference flag stunt. But it is part of the Lib Dem attempt to woo current and former Tories — many target voters in Middle England are more accustomed to seeing the Union Flag on bunting at a village fête, than carried at protest marches like those seen over the summer in parts of the U.K.

A second senior Lib Dem MP said: “This kind of ‘bake sale politics’ is very familiar to me for the rural parts of my constituency where some people are quite affluent and have a sense of community around the village hall,” they said, but added that the party is looking beyond the “village cricket square Tory” to people who think “there are some core values for our country of decency, fairness and stability, which we don’t think the Conservatives are standing for anymore.”

The first senior Lib Dem MP said that Conservatives’ move to the right to tackle Reform UK has meant it has moved “further and further away from its voters,” citing its ditching of the long-standing cross-party consensus on everything from green energy to international aid.

“As people have looked on in horror and with disgust at where the Tory party is going, they’ve been open for another party to come into that space,” they added.

In his speech Tuesday Davey openly called for Conservative defectors, telling the conference: “Come, Conservative friends. Help us save our country. Come and win with us.”

It’s anyone’s game

The Lib Dem operation to squeeze the remaining Tory vote ahead of the next election — and local and regional elections in between — is part of its plan to win as many seats as possible in order to keep Reform UK out of government.

“I think we see it as part of our moral duty to stop Farage and stop Reform,” said the first senior Lib Dem MP, while a second said: “A huge number of activists here, and people who are joining us, are doing so precisely because they think Farage’s brand of populism is something they want to stand up against.”

The narrowing of the poll gap between Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems and the Greens — who are now separated by as little as seven points — is prompting a rethink on where the party should direct its election resources.

The party is now targeting not only the seats in which it finished second in 2024, but also those where it finished third. The same senior Lib Dem strategist quoted above said that polling now sees the threshold to win a seat drop from 40 to 45 percent of the vote, to only 30 to 35 percent.

The same senior Lib Dem MP added: “It looks like we are moving away from a two-party system, and that a number of different constituencies could be a four- or five-way split. It’s entirely possible that at the next general election, you could have a situation where people are almost winning by accident, by a few votes here and there, based on turnout or one random issue in a particular constituency that doesn’t impact the neighboring one.”

This has prompted questions for Davey about who he might be willing to go into coalition with. He has not ruled a coalition out.

Luke Tryl, U.K. director of the think tank More in Common, said: “You get the feeling that in this era of politics the chips could land anywhere,” but added: “I think a Lib-Lab coalition at the next election is an underpriced outcome.”

Though the last coalition with the Conservatives had a bruising effect on the party in the years since, some party figures are happy to try again.

“I’m of the school that thinks that political parties are here to be in government. Yeah, you might come out of it and lose and lose badly, but what is the point in competing to have an impact on the country, if you are not actually serious about being in government,” said the second senior Lib Dem.

Nicholas Earl contributed to this report.