“There isn’t even any security!” declared one party conference veteran, gesturing beyond the patchily furnished exhibition hall, where the stands of the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors and the Liberal Democrat Christian Forum were attempting to coax delegates with their wares. “Where’s the ring of steel?”
Where indeed. For the past 15 years, as anyone who has been privileged or cursed enough to attend the annual powwow of one of the two main parties knows, the first challenge is to getting through the door past a gaggle of campaigners, then through the massed ranks of harried bag-checkers and armed policemen.
When they entered coalition government in 2010 and there was the slim chance that someone might want to take out then pensions minister Steve Webb, or rural affairs under-secretary of state Dan Rogerson, the Lib Dems found themselves admitted into this happy band, at last important enough to warrant X-ray scanners.
But electoral annihilation in May has brought the Lib Dems the cold comfort of security irrelevance, meaning delegates in a drizzly Bournemouth on Monday were obliged to do little more than flash a lanyard at a security guard and breeze on in. Obviously it’s great that nobody wants to kill them. It’s just that nobody wants to vote for them either.
There is, of course, much pathos in the abrupt reduction of a party of government to a feeble shadow of its previous parliamentary self, mercilessly squashed from 56 MPs to eight. The conference shop in Bournemouth was offering laminated badges of current MPs for 50p apiece, meaning one could, if one so wished, sport the entire parliamentary party on two lapels.
They were carrying on, doing what Lib Dems do – passing a vote that male and female check boxes should be phased out on official documents or replaced by an “X” option, and harrumphing gently about the absence of promised gluten-free cakes in the cafe – but there was no denying that the abrupt collapse in the party’s influence is palpable and painful.
And yet the liberals are a phlegmatic bunch, with little intention of letting a small thing like parliamentary near irrelevance dent their spirits. They do have things to cheer about, too – it may not quite be a surge on a Corbynesque scale, but 20,000 new members since May means a third of the party’s total is now a new joiner; their demographic, according to a party spinner, is skewing “quite considerably” towards young professionals.
Four months after nearly being extinguished altogether, the party is now boasting its largest ever number of party members attending conference. Someone should bottle that positivity and flog it.
Into this happy scene strode the ghost of government past, Nick Clegg. There are plenty of Lib Dems who can’t forgive Clegg for the coalition, but wasn’t it nice, just for a moment, to remember the good old days?
The May result had been a very public drubbing, said Clegg, acknowledging “my own mistakes and miscalculations” in the election strategy. In the words of a sage of old: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.
Just not as sorry as everyone who hadn’t voted Lib Dem – from the remorseful Green voter who greeted him almost in tears on the morning of 8 May, to, well, everyone else who now had “buyers’ remorse”.
Don’t worry, said Clegg: “I firmly believe we can be the comeback kids of British politics.” And after the extraordinary last six months, one must suppose anything is possible.
He praised them for being “the most resilient party in politics”. Not the biggest, not the most dynamic, far from the most influential - but still hanging on. And that, in itself, was not nothing.
