I just got back from whirlwind trip to Blackpool for Lib Dem party conference ... for once, something rather interesting appears to be going on. Yes, it was all as lovably disorganised as ever; and yes, I did see a man addressing the nation from the conference floor dressed in an orange pac-a-mac. And yes, it was probably a mistake to come to Blackpool, where Lib Dems rattle around the Winter Gardens only serving to remind you that there aren't as many people around when Labour and the Tories come.
But. There's been a genuine argument about ideas at this conference, which is an increasingly rare thing in politics: real big fat juicy issues being bandied around - tax cuts or not? Troops in or out of Iraq? Amnesties for immigrants? - which, whether mad or not, are at least substantial debates. And the arguments are substantial too, people disagreeing violently and publicly about stuff. Yet oddly, without punching each other.
This is of course what the Tories are supposed to be doing - they delayed their actual leadership contest so that they could have a contest of ideas first - but aren't, because inevitably what happened was that the leadership contest just started early and covertly, and now nobody dares say anything interesting for fear of losing support from some wing of the party or other.
And while Labour is having a quieter tug of war - which might become very noisy next week at their party conference - about which direction to go in when Tony Blair retires, again I suspect that's going to get squished because of the danger of it contaminating the smooth handover both Blair and Gordon Brown want.
So the Lib Dems have got it right by - in theory at least - divorcing this argument about direction from the issue of who leads the party: Kennedy is allowing a thousand flowers to bloom by not slapping down anyone's ideas, and not specifying himself which ones he does and doesn't agree with. Nonetheless, given that all the interesting ideas are thus far coming from other people, the question du jour is what precisely Charles Kennedy is for?
Peter Oborne, the political editor of the Spectator, described him in the video we used to introduce the Observer's conference fringe event as sitting there like a big marrow in a vegetable patch, betraying no sign of knowing which way things were going to end up, and I was interested to see that - while Lib Dems normally boo and hiss at anything critical of their party on the film, pantomime-style - there wasn't much response to Oborne. They do not love Charles like they used to.
Of course Kennedy has always been a rather Zen politician: the less he actually does, the more the voters seem to like him, and the chattering classes at Westminster have been caught out more than once complaining about how lacklustre he is only to discover that lacklustre is popular, in an era of relentless spin. All that yomping around yelling about preparing for government never did Paddy Ashdown any good, after all. And being a marrow may have its advantages if you are chasing protest votes from both right and left, since the less people actually know about your policies, the more easily they can then project onto the blank canvas that is Kennedy whatever they want to see.
Nonetheless, I think he's got some ground to make up with his speech today. Or, sometime in the next few years, someone - one of those young thrusting frontbench types on display over the last couple of days - is probably going to come tiptoeing through the vegetable patch with a big spade.
