The People’s Republic of Mortimer is very much your modern, convenient lock-up-and-leave totalitarian state, so when this diary was suggested as a way of keeping homebodies in touch with the all-singing all-dancing excitement that is a political party conference, I had only to change the guard, cancel the milk and weaken the currency so that no-one would be popular enough to mount a coup while I was gone.

Our grand progress northwards was agreeably punctuated by a very kind man offering to buy us a sandwich (seeing that we were embarrassed for funds; it is an expensive business running a republic) and the most patriotically scouse train manager one could wish for: “This train will be calling at Watford Junction, Nuneaton, Stafford, Crewe, Runcorn and Liverpool – city of culture 2008 – Lime Street. Expected time of arrival in Liverpool – eight times European cup winners – is 12.47. On behalf of the driver, the crew, the trolley staff, the people in the shop and the fluffy mascot on the dashboard may I warmly welcome you aboard this Virgin Trains service to the greatest city on earth and assure you that we will be bearing you away from the dirty south as fast as humanly possible.”

Emerging from Lime Street station is a fine if disconcerting experience. Why, someone has picked up the Roman forum, rebuilt it at its zenith and plonked it down in the middle of a whirlwind of merciless relief roads! You can still sense, around Lime Street and along the docks in particular, the puffy pride of those Victorian grandees pretending they were Pericles, bolting on superbly extravagant civic buildings to what had formerly been a very ordinary if sprawling port city. The experience of sailing up the Mersey to dock at Liverpool must have been, to your average Irish famine victim for example, something akin to how arriving by ship at New York feels now.

While fermenting these august thoughts I am knocked off my feet by the kind of wind you just don’t get in the south except at the very top of Box Hill on an exceptionally bad day, and I hurry undercover to locate my bearings and consult the conference agenda. I am bemused by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any way of marrying up the main conference agenda with the fringe diary. It’s as if they are each embarrassed about the existence of the other. Eventually I sort out that most of Friday morning’s events are training sessions for more actively involved (i.e. less lazy) politicoes than I, and most of these are by invitation only – how to deal with negative campaigning, getting your message right, and so on. I haven’t actually registered yet (I am in all senses your authentically chaotic first-timer) due to the same funding embarrassment that rendered me sandwichless on the train. A pretty pass, thinks I – I am reporting the weekend for LDV, and I’m even up for a gong for Best Pontification of the Female Persuasion, but I can’t actually afford to be here.

Once I have resolved my plans for the next couple of days, I head into town with the Liberal Review, who is kindly ensuring that I don’t starve, to a locally organised event called Liberal Discussions at the Crowne Plaza Hotel where many conference events are taking place. On our way from the bar (we are thinking ahead) to the Brunswick Suite, who should we pass in the lobby but the Cleggster, springy-haired as ever and fresh off the evening train. We grin inanely in his general direction like faithful basset hounds and he rewards us with a pat on the head and a biscuit. Liberal Discussions is the first in a series of events organised by the PPC, Colin Eldridge who was interviewed for these virtual pages by Alex Foster a couple of days ago. He wants the local party to feel they have access to communal policy discussions on the big questions – it’s easy to fall into the humdrum of logistical party work and never actually air as a collective group why each of you is motivated to do it. I think this is an excellent notion, and timing the first one with conference is also a planning masterstroke because the big cheeses are in town and this evening Lord Rennard is the main event, followed up by the party Head of Campaigns and Elections, Hilary Stevenson. The topic is no less than “The Future of the Liberal Democrats”.

Lord R begins with a history lesson going back (almost exactly) twenty years. Many regular readers will be aware of the gist of what follows and can skip straight to the next Amusing Anecdote, but I sketch out the lecture for the benefit of the silent reader who has a life (fancy!) and hence is not familiar with every by-election result since 1988. Phase one of the Liberal Democrat story in the late eighties and early nineties was survival. Polling around 5% nationally, a strategy gradually emerged which Lord R identifies as the guerrilla approach. It’s in two halves: nationally, we picked on the issues that would get us noticed, and were able to adopt more controversial positions than parties who had more to lose. I was struck here by the ring of similarity in Nick Clegg’s words of the other day – there will be more walk-outs and stands taken because it gets us noticed. It’s good to take up edgy positions and not worry unduly about the consequences. The other half of the guerrilla strategy was the now famous Rennard method: harnessing local energy, campaigning on local issues, building effective local communication networks – who knew that Liverpool was the original home of Focus? The guerrilla approach was about targetting of the odd places where the party could gain ground and knocking them down one-by-one, simply by dint of better campaigning techniques and better local involvement than the other parties, whose focus was always national. People can tell when politicians don’t need them.

So far, so plucky little underdog. Phase two saw the extension of these survival techniques into national campaigning. What worked for local government could work in national constituencies as well. The party made eight new gains in the 2001 election and held all its existing seats but two – “and the two seats we lost were the ones who didn’t do what they were told,” chuckled Lord R, “So I had them thrown to the scorpions.” No, he didn’t say that last bit really. A more amiable strategic communications guru you wouldn’t meet, I think. In fact one of the most interesting techniques I learnt in the evening was the salami-tactic approach to getting leaflet deliverers which very much depends on one’s amiability. It works like this – you turn up on the doorstep of a known supporter carrying your bodyweight in leaflets and looking pathetic. You spend a few minutes chatting with them and wonder, helplessly, if they wouldn’t mind delivering a batch of your leaflets – just this once, just in this street and the next one, say. You look so snowed under that they agree. Next time you have a delivery in that area, you knock again. They recognise you, so you don’t have to go through the whole explanation – would they mind doing another batch? The third time you knock, they know exactly what to do, and the fourth time you don’t even need to turn up in person, you send someone else from the leaflet network. This slice-by-slice approach had never occurred to yours truly, painfully eager as I am to outline in minute detail exactly what a new leaflet-bod has to do and how often and what the relative advantages and disadvantages are.

Anyhow, phase three in the Liberal Democrat story brings us up to date, and here Lord R can see the shape of the problem but not, yet, the solution. We are on the cusp of building wider national appeal. The ground war is being won (he apologises for the continuing militaristic metaphors) – now we start tackling the air war, putting out a clear national message. This was achieved to some extent in 2005, when the Liberal Democrats were clearly identified with two key stances: against the war in Iraq and against tuition fees. A less successful identifier was the green agenda, since realised more fully in the form of the Green Tax Switch and now becoming more recognisably a Lib Dem badge of honour. But while these policies were clear and consistent, they did not by themselves add up to a more abstract principled message. Lord R’s analogy here was thankfully from the far more comforting world of food – Lib Dem policy stance is like a list of delicious and interesting ingredients that will individually appeal to people, but we haven’t successfully told them what the actual result of the recipe will be. Nick Clegg, gradually establishing himself as a brand in the public mind, is key to conjuring up that recipe and presenting it to people.

We were among friends, and the tone of the evening was, on the whole, most awfully jolly, good eggy and positive. But even so I found this thought of Lord R’s particularly encouraging for a rank and file member – the Liberal Democrats are the only party moving towards their central philosophy. The Tories and Labour are moving away from theirs. Nick has reclaimed the L word – something Lord R concedes he was wary of doing – and is making it our main identifier. Another revealing anecdote: Lord R asked a focus group about their perception of the Liberal Democrats. Blank faces. No-one had a clear picture of what the party stood for. Well, what about the word “liberal”? Oh, well, that’s easier. Liberal means being allowed to do what you like and be what you like, and not judging others for being different. And “democracy”? Oh, that’s easy too! Democracy, the rule of the people, everybody has an equal say. So… Liberal Democrat? Oh, right! I see!

Dear homebody reader, there is much else I could report, but we are not at home in our leisurely Republic and this post is coming to you in real time from Merseyside, where I now have to scurry down to the Conference Centre, sort out my registration, meet up with various bods and be just, you know, generally around in case something, you know, happens. Suffice it to say of Thursday evening that the Liberal Review and MatGB and I amongst others then proceeded from the scary space age Crowne Plaza to the more comforting ambience of the nearest Wetherspoons. It’s not that I’ve never been outside the south-east, but I cannot get used to the astounding price of the beer up here – “Two pints of Kronenburg, please,” “Four pound forty, love, “What, each? That’s a bit steep…”, “No, altogether,”, “…Sorry?”. We finish up in the Cavern until oneish, gawping at all the pictures of the famous people and talking, to my total lack of astonishment, real ale, board games, LVT (I won, I won! I mentioned it first!) and the European referendum, of which more anon.

Join me again for Part Deux of my virginal conference diary, in which I shall bring news straight from this screen to your noggin of the Friday night rally, the Liberal Drinks, and the mysterious, mighty Superlambanana…