Ed Davey is from a rudderless, gormless swamp where dreams go to die

We're all used to Ed Davey's stunts by now - they're his go-to method to drum up attention from a media ecosystem he feels is in thrall to Reform. It's not hard to understand his envy. At the last election, the Lib Dems walked away with 72 MPs - their highest number ever. Yet with just five MPs, Reform has managed to capture far more attention than anything his party puts out. But is anyone surprised? Other than cheap gimmicks and incoherent policy positions, what do the Lib Dems actually stand for?

They attempted to rectify that at their party conference in Bournemouth this week, where Davey delivered a keynote speech pitched as a moment of clarity. Instead, it turned into a showcase of just how detached he is from the national mood. His big crescendo was a dire warning about the supposed horrors of "Farage's Britain".

The trouble was, he couldn't even get the basics of British life right. We don't, for instance, have a constitutional right to bear arms, yet Davey invoked American gun culture and the spectre of mass-shooting drills in schools as though Farage was plotting to turn Dorset into Dallas.

In doing so, he managed both to misrepresent Britain and to caricature America - a country that, for better or worse, largely voted for the very policies Davey sneers at. He is in for a rude awakening when he grasps that plenty of ordinary Britons share instincts closer to those "dreaded Americans" than to his own focus-grouped platitudes.

But this aside, if you can't remember a single detail from the Lib Dem conference, don't feel bad. Nobody else can either. Polls show the Lib Dems languishing with barely half the support of Reform. Party grandees insist this is because they are 'moderate' and 'reasonable', not irrelevant. Yet that is the problem.

Their version of 'reasonable' is little more than soggy centrism. To them, anyone who dares sit to their right is automatically 'extreme'. That's not moderation; it's smugness masquerading as virtue.

Just look at Davey's self-styled Jeremiah act during the conference. He spoke of "dark forces" in British politics, urging activists to picture a country where the NHS was scrapped and patients crushed by private insurance. Stirring stuff - except that the NHS is already failing millions and high energy bills are punishing households.

His apocalyptic sermonising made him sound less like a party leader and more like a second-rate priest, waving incense at imaginary demons while ignoring the very real decline in front of him. The willingness of his audience to treat his words as visionary can only be described as mass psychosis.

Yet Davey knows that simply muttering Farage's name is enough to guarantee column inches. He throws out caricatures because he knows the media will run with them. It's a convenient distraction because it saves people from looking too closely at his own chequered record - such as his stint as postal affairs minister during the Horizon scandal.

His strategy is clear: if politics can be recast as a binary choice between Davey and Farage, then maybe, just maybe, the Lib Dems can ride Reform's coattails into relevance.

Yet the idea collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Davey isn't an outsider fighting a populist insurgency; he is the consummate insider, a man who has spent a decade inside the same political class that has presided over policy failure after failure.

Far from offering an alternative, his party only matters when it's scavenging the entrails of Labour and the Tories. And the most telling thing is that Davey's conference address wasn't about policies the Lib Dems might enact, but about bogeymen they oppose, from Farage to Elon to Kemi. It's always clearer what they're against than what they're for.

When he warned that "Farage's Britain" would see Andrew Tate held up as a role model and Britain leaving the ECHR, it sounded less like serious politics and more like a late-night Twitter rant.

And then there was his bold 'plan' to win over millions of Tory 'moderates' supposedly craving a pivot to the political centre. But no one is yearning for that. The British centre ground - that rudderless, gormless swamp where dreams go to die - is precisely what has hollowed out the country, leaving it trapped in sustained decline.

Offering voters even more of it is hardly a rallying cry. What Ed Davey really achieved was to show that the Lib Dems have nothing to offer except tired clichés, false bogeymen and cheap stunts.

Against that, Farage hardly needs to try.