The best speech in Brighton yesterday wasn't the one made by the Lib Dems' last leader. It was the one delivered by the leader before him - and it was about British foreign policy and the Middle East, subjects that have received relatively little attention this year.
Lord Ashdown made a prediction that drew sharp intakes of breath from his audience at a BBC fringe event on the post-9/11 world.
"Unless we can find a new way of thinking, I am very pessimistic about our ability to avoid large scale war involving the use of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East in the next five years, and in the Far East in the next 20."
"Paddy" - as the party still knows him - argued that the power of nation states was ebbing as globalised phenomena like banks, the internet, multinationals and satellite broadcasters enabled al-Qaida to
"morph, draw recruits, plan operations and execute preparations without any of the cumbersome and vulnerable paraphernalia of a conventional military structure. ... It materialises in the moment of the attack and vanishes again into the global space the moment after."
The current spasms and conflicts were neither a war on terror nor a clash of civilisations, Lord Ashdown told delegates. They were a "campaign for civilisation" and "against a new medievalism", he said.
Delegates' eyes can be relied upon to mist over when the Liberal PM Gladstone is mentioned, and Lord Ashdown did not disappoint them:
"Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can ever be your own," he quoted.
Lord Ashdown offered no pat solutions to the global crisis - but he did urge delegates to buy his forthcoming book on the globalisation of power. They will. "Paddy" has long since been forgiven for his failed pact with Tony Blair before the 1997 election.
