Reform and the Tories are nowhere to be seen in this lefty urban jungle of tower blocks, corner shops and cycle lanes. This is prime territory for one of the key battles shaping up for this set of local elections: a tired and unpopular governing Labour Party up against the insurgent Greens. A recent poll put eco-populist leader Zack Polanski on track to wrench this corner of Labour’s London heartlands, while YouGov’s latest MRP of the capital shows a nail-bitingly close race.

Yet in the midst of this red-green war, tendrils of yellow (or orange – the exact colour is hotly debated) are attempting to creep through. Out and about around my local corner of north London, I find a textbook Liberal Democrat campaign. It begins in a community owned pub in Bowes Park, a neighbourhood of family homes and Cypriot cafes on the outskirts of Haringey, where inner city high-rises start to blur into terraced suburbia.

The Lib Dem candidate here, Dan Jones, is the mastermind behind the pub. It is owned by local residents after Jones launched a successful fundraising campaign to buy the building, nestled on a street of independent shops and restaurants, back from a developer insistent on turning it into flats. He also voted Labour in the general election two years ago.

This recent change of allegiance does not seem to bother him. In fact, it chimes perfectly with the party’s message here: Feel let down by Labour? Give the Lib Dems a try instead.

As I traipse around the surrounding streets on an unseasonably hot April afternoon, Lib Dem posters in the windows far outnumber any other party. On the doorstep, voters get a pitch about local policing and more money for upgrading playground facilities. There are accusations that the council is diverting money to other areas like Tottenham, ignoring the somewhat more middle-class residents here.

Complaints about the peculiarities of the low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN) dominate. No one mentions Ed Davey, Keir Starmer, Donald Trump, the Iran war, or even Brexit. Campaigners and voters alike seem happy with this arrangement.

The one exception is a middle-aged man eager to list his grievances with Nick Clegg. He is reassured that the former deputy prime minister abandoned frontline politics long ago for Silicon Valley. There is no question: voting for change here means voting against Labour.

And the Lib Dems are on-hand with a ready-made alternative. The day after I shadow Lib Dem pavement pounders across this patch of north London, the party launches “Operation Dodo”. The less-than-subtle title refers to the Conservatives, who the memo claims are facing “an extinction-level event in their former heartlands”.

Those heartlands include Hampshire, East Surrey, West Surrey, East Sussex and Huntingdon (once home to John Major), and are about as different from Haringey as one can get. But the messaging is remarkably similar: if you’re fed up with the Tories, try the Lib Dems – with an added flavour of “stop Reform here”. The story in the run-up to these local elections has been one of insurgents: Reform on the right and the Greens on the left, cannibalising support from the two mainstream parties.

The Lib Dems, traditionally the default “other” option, have been left behind in both narrative and polling terms. As the Greens have risen in national polls to vie with Labour and the Conservatives below top-placed Reform, Ed Davey’s party of 72 MPs has remained stubbornly stable, on around 12 per cent of the vote. Voters are not abandoning the Lib Dems, but neither are they flocking to them in droves.

One might imagine the Lib Dems are a tad annoyed about this. And among the party’s new cohort of MPs, frustration is growing that they seem to have been overtaken by glitzier options, with complaints about Davey’s lack of direction. “He’s just too beige,” one MP laments.

They are not alone in their sentiment. But in terms of the local elections, party strategists genuinely believe this lack of definition plays to their strengths. “We’re everyone’s second choice,” a senior Lib Dem source tells me.

“Which might not sound very glamorous, but under first past the post (FPTP), that matters.” The Liberal Democrat Party has spent its entire existence lobbying for electoral reform, railing against the injustice of the FPTP system that – until now – has shoved smaller parties to the fringes. But it has recently figured out how to make the current voting model work in its own interests. After the disappointment of 2019 (a humiliating attempt at a national campaign which resulted in a leader who had claimed she could potentially be prime minister losing her own seat), the party changed its strategy. Resources would be ruthlessly targeted at area