Lib Dem conference ‘worryingly quiet’ says Clegg

“It’s worryingly quiet…wouldn’t think there was a Conference going on”, Nick Clegg was overheard saying to officers at Birmingham Police Station a moment ago as they scanned CCTV picture of the Conference centre.

As Conference empties now to the sounds of a stately piece of Baroque music this must go down as a fairly uncontroversial and low-key soft launch to the conference season. The Lib Dems used to get 80 per cent of their annual TV coverage (or something like that) from the one week of conference (in a non-election year) and work ferociously to catch the media’s eye. With saturation coverage now a daily event those days seem long gone.

Chatting around the Conference to ministers you find quite a lot of difference in tone.

“Plan A+ is not a term I would use” one Clegg loyalist minister said. He was gently swiping his own leader for a phrase he thought was too resonant of a change in strategy.

But the government is looking at all sorts of policy areas as part of its growth review. That means making sure capital spending already committed actually happens and reconsidering past pledges on areas like energy policy to see if the government’s policy is actually the best thing for growth.

The overall spending envelope will remain the same but that doesn’t mean the government won’t magic funds out of departmental underspends and the reserve occasionally.

The Lib Dem position on the 50p tax rate hasn’t changed but with a conference happening you can secure a few headlines just by repeating the existing position.

The party doesn’t want to ditch the 50p with no replacement at a time when the country is hurting badly. By “replacement” the party means something that extracts some money from the better off to match the tax foregone with the 50p.

Discussions about what that replacement could be haven’t even started but it’s not impossible that George Osborne, come the day, could propose a package of measures to the Lib Dems with proposals like tax relief on pensions for higher earners in the mix.

Evan Harris’ attempt to force a vote on the NHS reforms into the Conference timetable failed. One leadership ally suggested writing a memoir entitled “We need to talk about Evan.”

But in the Conference hall it wasn’t hard to sense continuing unease about a set of reforms that Nick Clegg has claimed the credit for having cleaned up.