I’m sort of in awe of Ed Davey. How does he still manage to wake up every day and, despite all the other challengers for the title, somehow knock it out of the park as the nation’s most embarrassing political leader? His address to the Liberal Democrat conference this week was a masterpiece. There he was, the Postmaster’s Friend, wedged into a pair of dad-chinos and reminiscing about his radical days at the college JCR. Davey is in some ways the perfect Lib Dem leader – an id for embarrassing middle-class England. If you cut him, he bleeds organic muesli and opposition to planning applications.

He ticked every box in his speech. He evoked Liberal Britain’s prelapsarian Eden: the opening of the 2012 Olympics, complete with a prolonged panegyric to Mo Farah. He poured scorn on its Ragnarok – Brexit. And he called out the country’s real enemies: the shadowy crypto billionaires who apparently are the reason why no government can make any decisions anymore.

For the party of Gladstone, it simply isn’t good enough to be a political Werther’s Original

For the party of Gladstone, it simply isn’t good enough to be a political Werther’s Original

Tellingly, Davey’s speech was one which largely recalled the past – and an imagined one at that. If Labour’s plans for votes for 16-year-olds go ahead, part of the electorate at the next general election might not even have been conceived at the time of the 2012 opening ceremony. It’s now been a full decade since the Brexit vote. These are icons of a past Britain which Sir Ed and his supporters find........

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