This was always going to be a disastrous conference. We have spent our annual opportunity to reach out to people by communicating a confused image. When the country needed hope, vision and leadership we offered it the ‘straight talk of progressive austerity’.

This disaster was foreseeable.

It was made from a dangerous mixture of a wrong political strategy (based on a wrong economic strategy) added to a leadership and a communications team which had very, very little political experience.

Ming Campbell and Vince Cable when they came to conference as leaders had to be stabilisers with a reassuring role. Before them, Charles Kennedy was a leader who was in philosophical accord with the party conference, and who was fortunate in the people who ran our campaigns and communications during that period.

So, the last time that a Lib Dem leader came to a conference with a similarly volatile cocktail was Paddy Ashdown in the mid-1990s, when he was endeavouring to persuade conference to drop equidistance from Labour.

That was nearly 15 years ago. Were Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander, John Sharkey even at conference at that time? Possibly not. So they and their team had absolutely no idea what might happen, and how to avoid the consequences of a leader being at such variance with the great majority of conference.

As speaker after speaker on behalf of the Leadership has said, “We don’t know the figures so we can’t rule anything in to our manifesto.” A corresponding logic is that there is no evidence to force us to rule anything out yet.

1977 has lessons for us in 2009. The Callaghan IMF crisis should teach us one thing. There is nothing so uncertain as economic predictions. When the dust settled, the cuts of that time weren’t necessary and led to greater unemployment, and eventually 10 years of Thatcherism.

Today there is still a great danger of deflation and escalating unemployment, with the misery and community tensions that these would let loose. We need public expenditure to provide the infrastructure, education and training (including undergraduate take-up) and political reform that will ‘Rebuild Britain’ (afresh if you like) economically, socially, culturally and politically.

So, we didn’t have to have a fight about tuition fees, and we did have a wonderful story to tell, and a great campaign to ‘Build Britain Anew’ to launch.

Cable has squandered some of his inheritance. Before this week, and perhaps afterwards still, he is the only person with the weight to convince the public of the economic need for that great campaign. I don’t know him at all. But he needs to become a team player bloody quickly.

Clegg has demonstrated his inexperience, his lack of weight, and his establishment perspective. (I worry that some of the pressure on Cable today comes not just from the more social liberals but also, as Thomas a Becket and Mo Mowlam, found to their cost from a leader’s coterie). Clegg and his colleagues must not fear Cable’s popularity; he must improve his own performance and find a fit with both Cable and his Parliamentary Party.

Clegg therefore needs to use the weeks of the Labour and Tory conferences to refashion his team radically into one that can help him lead the anti-establishment movement that is waiting throughout the country for a lead.

We still face an economic, a cultural and a democratic crisis. Our approach, our policies, our appeal – our narrative, if you like – is indeed made for this moment. This moment is not defined by our position in relation to other parties. Those other parties are considered by the rest of the country as being the problem.

This moment is defined by our relation to the people of this country. Our ability to reach out to them in an hour of great need is through our members, our councillors and our members of the parliaments through an integrated campaign of renaissance, renewal and revival.

We must bring forward a great plan of Reform. Reform of the economy. Reform of the way the State too often enslaves rather than liberates. Reform of our culture that too often divides, excludes, atomises and bullies. And, above all, we need the political reform of STV (not AVS!)

In short, we must energise and direct the emerging movement for reform and renewal.

* William le Breton is a former chair and president of the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors.