Talk about the Westminster bubble, what about the Liberal Democrat Glasgow bubble? Lib Dem activists seem to have convinced themselves this week that they are not on the brink of annihilation. Even Peter Kellner’s dampening predictions that they might only win 20 to 30 seats at the next election has not dented their confidence.

You don’t have to do much to have a good conference this year. As the secretary of state for energy and climate change Ed Davey, who gave out prizes to the local Lib Dem worthies before Nick Clegg’s speech, remarked: ‘The leader has not forgotten to put the deficit in his speech and no one has defected. I call that success!’

But Clegg was behaving like a desperate and ageing lover. The problem is that he was trying to woo publicly at least three different factions, a task younger and fitter lotharios might find a stretch.

First he was stroking Lib Dem party activists who want to know how much they have achieved in government and how awful the other possible lovers are.

He needed to keep the Tories, who he is sleeping with already, onside, while still playing a little hard to get. At the same time he wanted to show he still finds the Labour party sexy in case he has to go with them.

Oh, and in that slightly obsessive way so redolent of desperate lovers he also showed a bit of leg to Green party voters, promising a ‘green planet’. And there was a bit of wrapping himself in the union flag for those that might fancy the United Kingdom independence party.

It was a contortion and a fudge, which is quite an achievement.

The fudge was the ‘ish’ of everything.  He took up Al Murray’s theme that British is something wonderfully vague because of the ‘ish’. It was a riff that Murray, the Pub Landlord star, used on Trafalgar Square at the Better Together rally in the week before the Scottish referendum vote. It was not done very well at the time and heated up by Clegg seemed a bit limp. Not a great way for any lover to start.

‘Labour’, he said, ‘have nothing to say on the economy. The Tories don’t either … compassionate Conservativism is dead and buried. If the Lib Dem voice is marginalised in British politics our country will be meaner, poorer and weaker.’

He argued Lib Dems had created a good government and delivered great policies on schools, pensions and human rights. He was particularly keen to emphasis how good to children the Lib Dems were and how good they would be to the mentally ill in the future. It was a plea to his members that the current relationship was worth sticking with.

His attack on Labour was that they had old policies and ruined the economy. But the seduction came in repeating the Miliband’s mantra on ‘vested interests’ and talking, for the benefits of the New Labour gang, about ‘an enabling state’.

The only real promise for the future that Clegg identified was ‘opportunity’. Or opportunism possibly. There were quite a lot of policies stolen from the two main parties.

The problem is that you rather expect a nice, boring and decent lover to be loyal to you, not racing off with others, let alone being serially unfaithful. Promising to be nice to children and the mentally ill almost made the offer slightly creepy.

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Sally Gimson is a journalist and Labour councillor in the London borough of Camden. She tweets @SallyGimson

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