Ed's saviour act will not drive Nigel out nor convert anyone

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.

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SERMON: Sir Ed Davey gave Liberal Democrats conference speech on Tuesday

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 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 get the basics of British life right.

We don't, for instance, have a constitutional right to bear arms, yet Davey invoked US 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 in support of the very policies Davey sneers at. He's in for a rude awakening when he grasps that plenty of ordinary Britons share instincts closer to those "dreaded Americans" than to his focus-grouped platitudes.