When Sky News asked me the question…  you know the one? The only question journalists ever ask Lib Dems. No? Okay, here’s a reminder:

Will the Lib Dems support Labour or the Conservatives in the event of a hung parliament?

Yes, that question. I admit I fluffed it:

Well.. that’s the question isn’t it? It’s hard to get anyone to ask us any other question. I’m on record as saying I couldn’t support a Liberal Democrat Party that propped up this Labour Government, and Nick’s on record as ruling that out.

Funnily enough, when preparing for the programme, it never occured to me that they’d ask that question, even though, as I’ve said before, it’s the only question journalists ever ask any Lib Dem. I thought it had been answered. No supporting Labour, end of story. Will we support the Tories… who knows?

As I was thinking about this today, it struck me that we’ve come out of this conference period with all the same problems we had before we started:

1 – People still don’t understand what the party stands for.

2 – People still think our only relevance to British Politics is what happens in the event of a hung parliament (and that’s arguably true unless something spectacular happens)

3 – People see us as a party with a shopping list of contradictory policies.

We like to call ourselves a progressive party, as the champions of change… but change starts at home. We can demonstrate our capacity to change by reforming our own party. Our failure to do this, our failure to address the screamingly obvious problems that everyone keeps telling us over and over we need to resolve, makes a mockery of our claims to be a reforming Government.

What we’re really saying is that we’re blind to criticism and indifferent to complaint and unable to see our own faults. Not exactly characteristics people look for in a future Government.

We have very clear and well defined obstacles and difficulties, yet we’ve spent a fortune getting together and not solved a single one of them.