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Ed Davey deliberately threw himself off a paddleboard on Tuesday, as the Lib Dem leader battled for attention in the first full week of the election campaign.
The Lib Dems have a long history of staging eye-catching stunts to avoid their message being drowned out by the Tories and Labour.
During a campaign stop at Lake Windermere in the Lake District, Davey took a paddleboard into the water then fell off it repeatedly.
Asked by the BBC is he had jumped in “on purpose”, Davey confessed: “Once I did. The rest I just kept falling in. But it’s fun.”
He said the “serious message” the party was trying to highlight was how sewage was damaging the UK’s beaches, rivers and lakes.
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The Lib Dems were almost wiped out at the 2015 election following the coalition government and the have struggled to make gains since.
But the party scored a series of impressive by-election victories in the last parliament.
Davey has now tried to position the party as solidly anti-Tory. He said in many parts of the country it was a Lib Dem vote that was the “powerful vote to defeat the Conservatives”.