Michael White on day three of the Lib Dem conference in Brighton
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8.30 am: Sir Ming Campbell fought his corner defending the Lib Dems idealistic tax plans against the Today programme's Carolyn Quinn just before the 8 o'clock news. ''An awful lot of people are doing badly under this Labour government,'' he said. ''Who is going to speak up for them?''
It reminded me of the time many years ago, when the late Robin Cook had not yet been frozen out of Labour's economic policy-making, and John Humphrys was harrying him on the top rate of income tax. ''This is a metropolitan obsession of people like you, John,'' said Cookie in that annoying but smart way of his. ''But even on the Today programme more of your listeners are affected by benefit levels than they are by higher tax rates.''
Judging by this morning's papers Ming seems to have got away with quoting an unnamed US presidential candidate, even older than him, who took the ''are you too old?'' question head-on. He promised ''not to make an issue of my opponent's youth and inexperience.'' Everyone laughed and the candidate won.
His name was Ronald Reagan, not a president greatly admired by Lib Dem activists. Surely, Ming would be better citing Gladstone (in No 10 at 84) or that ex-Liberal, Winston Churchill, who took on the premiership at 65 in distinctly trying times. The Germans at Calais in 1940 is a tougher challenge than the Lib Dems in Brighton.
9.00 am. BBC pundits, Evan Davis, Nick Robinson and the giggly Robert Peston gathered later on Today to pick over the financial crisis with Jim Naughtie. They all agreed that ''a total lack of trust'' in the public authorities - government, Bank of England, Financial Services Authority - had contributed to the run on the Northern Rock.
Naughtie quoted an email from a listener, one of many who apparently said:'' It was only when the government started making reassuring noises that I started getting worried.'' Is this a new Black Wednesday - the event that ruined John Major - or just a consumer panic that will pass like the petrol pumps crisis of September 2000, they asked each other.
As usual, the role of the media itself in fomenting panic was left out of the script. This is the first run on a UK bank during the 24/7 rolling news era - in which queues building up on high streets were on screen all day. Newspapers have been panicking for decades - ''Is Our Money Safe?'' screamed Friday's Mail - but rolling news raises the stakes all round and undermines trust still further.
Ah, but that's New Labour's fault, reply the pundits, it's all down to spin. But spin, Tory, Labour and even Lib Dem, was a response to the problems posed by aggressive rolling news and the voracious appetite for something new to update the bulletins, not the cause of it.
You don't believe me ? Then look at the way the Madeleine McCann case has been covered, a rolling coaster of prejudged coverage, innuendo and half-truth from the start. One minute the parents are heroes, the next suspected murderers.
Even the BBC has dropped formerly tight rules against speculation and conjecture, a chum there tells me. And we're still no wiser as to what happened to the poor child. It may be only a matter of time before the lads blame Tony Blair. Or even Ming.
11.0 am: The ex-Labour leftwinger, Brian Sedgemore, who defected back to the Liberal Democrat party of his youth, has just made an impassioned speech during the tax debate, attacking Gordon Brown for hypocrisy and telling the conference it must ''fight, fight and fight again against this government's immoral tax regime.''
He won loud applause. Yet the ''fight, fight and fight again'' line, with its echoes of Hugh Gaitskell's 1960 speech at Labour's Scarborough conference - after he was defeated on unilateral nuclear disarmament - underlines what a strange political journey Mr Sedgemore has taken.
When I first knew him in the mid-70s he was Tony Benn's unofficial spin doctor (we didn't call them that) at Westminster, the leftwing MP to whom we turned to have the coded messages in the industry /later energy secretary's speeches decoded. Benn was inside the Callaghan cabinet, but not exactly loyally so. Brian rode the tide of Bennery into its high watermark of the early 80s whenhe undermined Michael Foot. But like his boss, Mr Benn, the price he paid was to be mistrusted by the colleagues. A clever man, but a loner, he never got a job from Blair-Brown. Yesterday was the final act of the drama.
More updates later
5.00 pm: It's been almost as quiet here today as it has been outside branches of the Northern Rock and hard to get much of a show on the news agenda. Charlie Kennedy intervened on the pensions debate and was cheered on and off the platform. He should not take it as a hint that they want him back.
The conference voted to cut 4p off basic rate of income tax, to take 2.5 million people out of tax credit and tax those unpopular cheap flight airlines. All brave, as they used to say in Yes Minister, but none braver than Danny Alexander, the party's work and pensions spokesman.
He is telling fellow Lib Dems that public sector pensions are a problem waiting to be tackled before too late. People who pay £1 into private pensions are also paying 91p in taxes towards public sector pensions, young Danny revealed today. This may not go down too well among Scots voters who include a lot of folk with public sector pensions. Mr Alexander is MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, all of it lovely countryside, but none of it in the Home Counties.
6.30pm: Observers detected a slight croak in Sir Ming's voice today, reminiscent of Iain Duncan Smith's croak, the most famous frog in a throat since Kermit. It was promptly diagnosed ''the death rattle.'' Rumour reaches the press tent that Channel 4 News has done a vox pop interview in which voters were asked to identify senior MPs. 8 out of 10 thought Ming was John Reid.
But there may be better news for the leader and his troops in tonight's Guardian/ICM opinion poll. My lips are sealed. Late flash: I have been rung to say that my scheduled appearance with Andrew Neil on The Politics Show tomorrow has been cancelled. It's tough in show biz.
