A tale of three cities

Conference Season: for people watching it on telly, it is noise coming from Huw Edwards’s face, with pictures of people waving. For the rest of us, the devil has blown into town. First come the Lib Dems, in Brighton — the only party sentimental enough to think of candy floss and helter skelters and then of politics. Lib Dems are damp, think damp, love damply: they haven’t been happy since 2010, when power fell on them like a book. Power disorientates them; they have the bewildered look of sheep forced to do algebra. They hate the Tories in their damp way, and only really sit up for Palestine, suddenly aggressive herbivores. There is a party: the Lib Dem Glee Club, in a cavernous room in a hotel, with pink light that makes everyone look like pink zombies, but knitted. A song book is offered — covers rewritten with Lib Dem lyrics; it is probably their manifesto. They stand and sing; an MP arrives, tells how he was locked out of his room naked in Jerusalem. They do not listen. They only want to sing the ‘12 Days of Coalition’ song: ‘On the first day of coalition the Tories gave to me, a ref-er-en-dum on AV. Which we lost!’ This seems to make them happy.

Later Clegg stands under a sign that says ‘Fairer Tax in Tough Times’. I would have gone for ‘It’s complicated’. Clegg’s very regular features are tweaked with self-righteous pain. The party treats him like a Zionist who is also their cousin, or a dog who made a terrible mistake; as he leaves the hall I imagine laser dots on his back.

For the press, of course, the struggle is to make this sound more interesting than it really is. In the media bunker, whispers harden into facts; trivia is gobbled and excreted; crazes occur, as at school.