Conference has always been a central element in my involvement in the Liberal Democrats. Like many of us, all year round I spend a large proportion of my waking hours doing things for the party – and being able to make links, exchange ideas and, yes, gossip with people from across the country at conference not only makes doing that year-round work easier, but also makes it very very much more fun. I have really missed them over the last three and a half years – with the final cruel punch of the last-minute cancellation for non-pandemic reasons of last autumn’s big return conference feeling particularly unfair.

So I will be thrilled to be back in York this weekend, surrounded by Liberal Democrats.

But as I finally get to catch up again with many of you, I will be giving more than a thought or two to some of those who I will not get the chance to see again at conference.

That last conference we held, in Bournemouth in 2019, “the one where Jo Swinson was leader”, was the last time I saw my former boss, Steve Hitchins, previously Leader of Islington Council. Steve was certainly not about to allow his walking difficulties stop him from getting up on to the stage and telling us how the health policies we were debating seemed to him as a former chair of an acute NHS Trust. Steve tragically and unexpectedly passed away just a few weeks later – a much too early sad loss of one of the party’s most robust campaigners and one of its most effective champions of frontline diversity.

In York I will, as always, go to an LDEG fringe meeting. But I will not see Derek Honeygold sitting – like Ted Heath – in a corner seat on the front row, as he must have done at pretty much every LDEG fringe meeting ever. In March 2020 Derek became one of the first victims of covid. LDEG fringes will not be the same without his twinkling eyes and intriguing contributions to the debate.

When I make it to the bar later, I will not turn round from ordering drinks to see there the beaming smile of Robert Woodthorpe-Browne, long a smiling stalwart of the party’s international scene, with something funny and interesting to say to me. Always so enthusiastic and encouraging, from LI Congresses in Africa and being chair of the international relations committee (FIRC), to the streets of London that I once went canvassing with him on, Robert’s utterly irrepressible energy made a huge contribution to the party before his very sudden death from a stroke this last autumn.

I will not have the chance to sup again from the well of the erudition of Jonathan Fryer – another deeply committed Liberal Democrat internationalist, former chair of the international relations committee and eternally super-enthusiastic MEP candidate. But too a regular BBC broadcaster, public Quaker, lecturer and so many other things – including, astonishingly, biographer and friend of Christopher Isherwood – before his awfully sudden and tragic death from a brain tumour.

I will not look up at one point to see the reassuring form of David Hughes sitting behind a table in a corner, his eyes twinkling at me in greeting as he sits amiably in the middle of some heated row others around him are having. Perhaps the loveliest and most good-natured man in the party, David had been one of its stalwarts before I was involved at all, and has cleaned up more of the party’s usually hidden messes created by others than we’ve had byelection wins. He tragically collapsed just after presenting his Treasurer’s report at a meeting of English Council just a few weeks before the first of our cancelled conferences.

And as the evening wears on, I will not suddenly find at my elbow the quiet smile of Andrew Maclean, as I usually did in the bar some time around midnight, ready for a gossip about some of the more obscure but crucial parts of the party’s organisation. A classic quiet backroom and IT expert, and such a lovely man, for many years Andrew did more than almost anyone knew to make bits of the party’s systems that few knew of and fewer understood, actually work.

When I emerge, slightly bleary-eyed the next morning, into the conference auditorium, I will sadly not see the reassuring figure of my former FPC colleague Ruth Coleman there, making her own way to a seat from where she would watch carefully, certainly comment, and sometimes contribute to the debates, from her own broad experience, from councils to Brussels.

I will not spot somewhere in the exhibition area the redoubtable, uncompromising presence of Tony Greaves expostulating his views to anyone within earshot, almost certainly about how the party’s leadership is betraying its liberal values and history. Tony and I did not often see eye to eye on political strategy. But I came to know him much better in the course of several months where we met weekly on a policy working group on public services about ten years ago, and I came to respect his deep understanding and imagination on areas which he knew and cared a lot about. Typically, at the last FPC meeting before the pandemic hit he put a bomb of careful thought under our planned programme of work and I am pleased our last exchange was a plan to get together to try and see how we might bridge our different approaches. FPC meetings are a lot easier, but also poorer and less usefully probing, without his contributions.

And then none of us will see again the legendary party figure of Erlend standing there at the Glee Club, very likely in a kilt, pint in hand, deep in earnest explanation of how some important aspect of Liberal Democrat history, or of party organisation, is widely misunderstood – or perhaps telling some famous moment of party history where, like Forrest Gump, he played a wholly hidden but crucial part. Erlend was my supervisor in my first piece of Liberal Democrat volunteering in the Cowley Street boardroom in 1994, and he has surely known everyone involved in the federal party at any time in the last three decades.

I will miss them – and, whether it knows it or not, the party already does. It will give me a chance to reflect on what they were passionate about in the party, and what we owe to them, as I raise a glass to them – do join me. And then seek to find the way to build that in to what the party actually does, to take forward their many and diverse superb liberal legacies.

* Jeremy Hargreaves is a vice chair of Federal Policy Committee and the Federal Board.