Michael White reports from the second day of the 2007 Lib Dem conference
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Brighton: breakfast time. Reviewing the previous evening, I recall seeing only one other reporter at Sir Ming Campbell's civil rights rally. Ming's speech was handed out hours ago. Why is he there? ''The death watch,'' he explains.
Normally that means ''just in case he's assassinated". ''But no one will assassinate Ming,'' I say. No, not that sort of death watch, he explains, and reminds me of the luckless theatre critic who left the performance before Tommy Cooper collapsed on stage.
It's a grey and windy morning on the seafront so I decide to forgo the treat of a swim in the sea in favour of the full cholesterol breakfast in my hotel. On Radio 4's Today programme Alistair Darling is struggling to restore calm in the financial markets and on the pavement outside Northern Rock branches. He sounds very rational, but rational may not be enough.
Later Paddy Ashdown pops up on air to reassure Sir Ming that all Lib Dem leaders get criticised rotten when a new leader in one of the bigger parties squeezes the third party poll. ''Keep going; you are on the right track.'' He also tells Ming that leaders should ignore ex-leaders and warns the ''young, not so young, very ambitious'' colleagues not to destabilise Ming. In doing all this he can't help reminding listeners how sharp he still is. Oh, dear.
9.30am: Chris Huhne knows his stuff and he knows it. He is the opposite of Boris Johnson, who seems to know almost nothing, but says it very engagingly. Chris still needs to work on the charm.
At the daily conference media briefing he steams ahead explaining how his environmental policy, to be debated later, is the first comprehensive one produced by a UK party - aimed at a carbon neutral Britain by 2050.
As he rattles through the details of penal £2,000 annual road fund taxes for gas-guzzlers, emissions trading, etc., he mentions that average Swedish energy bills - at £385 a year - are much lower than Britain's despite it being a tad colder in January. I try to check the figure with the two reporters sitting next to me. But neither had been listening ... zzzzzz.
9.45am: Huhne is required to bat away the first leadership question of the day. ''There is absolutely no vacancy for the leadership. I think Ming, when given the chance to put forward during the election the kind of proposals being put forward here this week, we will have a very familiar result: we will go up.''
I leave in time to catch the end of Vince Cable's big speech as Lib Dem shadow chancellor. This should be a good day for Dr Vince - he's been warning against the debt mountain - and an FT chum is scornful that some party committee has failed to put him up just before the lunchtime news.
I sort of admire them for not running a made-for-TV conference. In any case, Vince is not made for TV. It's a good speech, even contains some good applause lines like ''Gordon Brown marks his own exam papers and awards himself 10 out of 10 '', but his delivery kills them.
Huhne, who comes on next, is better. ''Brown is not green'' and ''the only thing green about John Redwood is his name". Apparently, David Cameron's Guardian Unlimited columns only used the word ''green'' three times, once to describe the benches in the Commons and once to mention his colleague Damien Green. The third was to chide Norman Lamont, his old boss, for talking prematurely of ''green shoots'' of economic recovery in 1993. Has Alistair Darling re-read that speech, I wonder.
10.30am: A young colleague in the press room demands to know how Huhne has the cheek to tell us all to give up cheap flights when he has five children. We suggest he may not have realised he was committing a ''green crime'' when he helped to conceive them. It is surely wrong to charge people retrospectively with crimes.
Later Matthew Parris of the Times arrives to discuss Lady Thatcher's meeting with Gordon Brown at No 10. We both agree that the old girl knew what she was doing; she wore pink.
Matthew explains: as people's minds start to close down in old age the last function to fade in a politician is malice.
Midday: Nigel Farage, the Ukip MEP and party leader, has turned up to hold a press conference urging the case for a referendum on the EU reform treaty, formerly the constitution. His host is Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies, who is as pro-EU as Mr Farage is anti.
Why invite him? Davies tells me he wants a referendum on the wider question of Britain's continued EU membership - in or out? That is now the Ming line, though it is coupled with rejection of a ballot confined to the new treaty.
Farage agrees; he just wants a referendum.
An ''in or out'' one would clear the air and is ''more winnable'' for Gordon Brown, should he be tempted or forced into one by a Lords or Commons vote, he explains.
But it won't make Ukip dissolve itself or turn into the United Europe Independence Party, will it, I ask. No, he agrees, but claims that - as with Labour's 1975 ballot - it will solve the issue for 15 years or so if the vote is "yes". Yeah, right.
All in all, it makes you realise why Brown won't touch this can of worms with a bargepole, unless forced to do so.
12.40pm. Olly Grender, who used to work for Paddy Ashdown, and I appear on BBC TV's Politics Show with Andrew Neil to discuss the conference. In media-speak this means asking if Ming will survive. I say he will, though not if the general election is postponed until 2009-10, as I think it will be.
It gives me a rare chance to examine Neil's hair. I have a theory that he is really as bald as I am, but declines to come out. At close inspection it looks like being close to the real thing, quite possibly the real thing itself, cunningly woven with 10,000 knots per square inch to resist a direct hit by a cruise missile. I am impressed.
1pm: John, the Guardian's video producer, and I attend the Guardian fringe debate, which is chaired by Simon Hoggart. A crowded hall hears Vince Cable, Julia Goldsworthy, Nick Clegg and Evan Harris discuss which is the bigger threat - Brown or Cameron. Brown by a mile, they agree.
For me the striking thing is how much better Cable is in this size of hall - 200 or so people at the back of the Grand Hotel. This morning in the main conference he died, but now he is very animated, articulate and effective. I discuss this with the woman standing next to me at the back.
The size of meeting he hates most is about a dozen. "He's shy,'' she explains. My neighbour turns out to be Rachel Cable, his wife, so I believe her. Journos like Vince. One questioner prompts Clegg (or is it Harris?) to complain that media attacks on Ming's age are completely out of order and wouldn't happen if the issue was race and gender. Er, not sure about that one.
The debate's best joke comes when Evan Harris - a real doctor - who demands more unpopular policies, joking that, fortunately, his marginal Oxford West and Abingdon constituency ''is full of gays, atheists and asylum-seekers". I fear that joke has been filed in the cellars at Tory HQ.
3.15pm: Ming does a Q&A session under the gentle chairmanship of Sandy Tosvig. At one stage he self-deprecatingly says ''I am a failure'' - perfectly harmless, but the press will pounce. Why is it not OK to admit, as he does, that he still gets scared before big public events? The screen on the conference floor misspells ''Menzies'' - pronounced ''Minges'' in Scotland, hence ''Ming'' - as ''Menzeis". Is it an omen?
