You know what it’s like at airports. You’ve been round WH Smith and Sock Shop, you’ve had a coffee and an apple danish and all you can do is wait. It seems Nick has at least got a wireless signal as he’s dashed off a quick email to party members.

Imagine you’re asking a friend or neighbour to vote Liberal Democrat in the 2015 General Election.

Imagine how it will feel to say that in Government, the Liberal Democrats scrapped ID cards. To say we cut crime while stopping Labour’s mass incarceration of children. That finally we have a fair tax system where the rich pay their share – and the lowest earners pay no income tax at all. You’ll say we brought troops home from Afghanistan after they’d finished the difficult job we sent them to do.

You’ll be able to tell people they have a new right to sack MPs who do wrong, and that the party funding scandals of the past are history. And if we campaign hard enough in the referendum on Fairer Votes you’ll be able to say the clapped out First Past the Post system is gone for good.

That is the goal, the prize, that I have set out in my speech to our Party Conference today.

In 2015 Britain will be a different country. For five years you and I will give it a different kind of government and a new politics. Five years of transforming the state and reversing generations of centralisation.

Five years of delivering fairer taxes, a fair start for every child, a rebalanced green economy, a cleaner politics – as we promised to do in our Liberal Democrat election manifesto.

The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives are and always will be separate parties, with distinct histories and different futures. But for this Parliament we work together to fix the problems we face and put the country on a better path.

This is the right Government for right now.

Our first job is a difficult one – balancing the budget.

Let me be clear with you about this – we are not dismantling the state. Even when all the cuts have happened, the Government will still be spending the same proportion of national income as it did in 2006. We will not repeat the mistakes of previous recessions.

But to delay solving the deficit would mean the Government would soon be paying £70 billion a year on interest payments alone. We cannot ask our children to pay our credit card bills.

We have to do it so that Britain in 2015 can be a different country.

Strong, fair, free. A country we can be proud to hand on to our children.

Thank you for all your support and all your hard work. Together we will change Britain for good.