Although Radio 5 were umming and ahhing about whether or not to tune in to Barack Obama’s speech or Nick Clegg’s, they thankfully picked Nick Clegg so I had the Leader keeping me company on the drive back up from Conference.

It’s not easy being the leader of the Lib Dems. He’s got to stop people switching to the Conservatives or the Greens, and he has to try to reach out to independents, soft Tories and soft Labour voters to, if he can, get them to consider voting Lib Dem. And… he needs to keep existing Lib Dems on board and avoid getting knifed. Meanwhile, he has no ability to impose policy – he’s completely at the mercy of what the members vote for or against.

The job is, in short, impossible.

Now away from the hardcore political geekery of the blogosphere, I think he gave some good reasons for people (not libertarians) to look at the Lib Dems: Removing people who earn less than £10,000 from tax is a brilliant policy – although you can appreciate it doesn’t go far enough for me -  I also think the stuff about breaking the state up, reducing the number of departments in Whitehall by half and devolving power is at least pointing in the right direction. I can support that sort of thing.

The Green stuff is, probably, a bit scary (not quite as scary as Glee club though.) It seems that this is for the Lib Dem activists who, as a rule, are less sceptical about climate change than I am. It could be that I’m completely out of touch with the majority opinion here, but I still believe that environmentalism is a vote loser… and fundamentally illiberal. There are strong parallels with the anti-Terror legislation – infringing liberty, making sacrifices in the hope that some unspecified thing might not happen in the future.

The Green issue is no less a threat to liberty – it’s just it primarily hurts people’s economic freedom, and Lib Dems, as a rule, don’t seem to make that connection that if you control people economically, you control them full stop.

Taking off my policy hat and putting on my communications hat, some of the rhetorical flourishes, too, were good. Telling the story about each of his team in their departments was a very nice touch – it answered the question, “what would a Lib Dem Government be like?” and it almost sounded quite good.

Nick’s obvious ambition and hunger for success comes across well, too. This was his best speech, but I don’t think it did anything to address the problems people have with this party once and for all.

The highlight? Pointing out that the people could make just about anyone the Government, if they wanted it badly enough. It doesn’t have to be the Tories, and it’s not right that Cameron might win power because it’s now his ‘turn’ rather than having to earn it.