QUENTIN LETTS: Have even the Lib Dems finally twigged Sir Ed is a bit of a fool?

Beyond Brighton pier, several dinghies were having a glorious day, scudding over the waves.

Things were a touch bumpy, too, inside the grim concrete conference centre where the Lib Dems had gathered. The head of Devon County Council gave his opinion of party leader Sir Ed Davey – and it was not pretty.

Sir Ed had ‘allowed other parties to go steaming past us,’ griped Devon’s Julian Brazil. ‘We seem to be peripheral. We’re lacking ambition, we’re lacking courage, we’re not saying things that people can relate to.’

Welcome to conference!

Have the ineffably patient Lib Dems finally twigged that 60-year-old Sir Ed is a bit of a fool?

After the conference’s three-hour lunch interval – three hours, and they don’t even drink – Sir Ed did a question-and-answer session chaired by former Radio 4 journalist Carolyn Quinn. She raised Mr Brazil’s fears that the party was ‘sleep-walking into irrelevance’ under him.

Sleep-walking into inaudibility, too. Sir Ed’s microphone was not working properly.

A tech bod had to creep on stage to pass him a hand-held mic which didn’t pop.

Once Sir Ed could be heard, he replied that he had known Mr Brazil for years, the unspoken suggestion being that Mr Brazil had always been a difficult beggar. Davey called him ‘a good local councillor’.

Translation: Stick to Devon issues, matey, or I’ll encourage your local colleagues to boot you out of your job. This was heard in silence by a hall that was not full.

Guest interviewers at party conferences are not expected to be especially rigorous, but Quinn did not give Sir Ed an easy time. She brought up Labour’s rumoured plan to impose the mansion tax on houses worth a mere £1.5million and noted that Sir Ed’s constituents in prosperous Kingston upon Thames would be ‘very interested’ in that.

Sir Ed, whose whole strategy is built on sucking up to Labour in the hope that he might become deputy prime minister in a future coalition, did not particularly want to slag off the Government. He therefore resorted to moaning about Brexit. That drew, as it always does from Lib Dems, a few warbly cheers.

Quinn upbraided Sir Ed for retreating into comfort territory and instead asked him if he wanted to keep the pensions triple lock. He did, but an apparent majority of hands in the hall did not agree with him. Oops. This was becoming awkward.

Sir Ed, pain corrugating his forehead, said it was plainly a ‘controversial matter’. You could sense the snowy ancients in the hall thinking: ‘He’s a stodgy bore and not even a stodgy bore who agrees with us. Councillor Brazil has a point.’

Other Lib Dem grandees, if one can use that noun, had sniffed this simmering dissent.

Daisy Cooper MP gave the morning’s main speech and she was dementedly energetic, throwing her arms around, striding about the stage, flashing her gnashers, bouncing up and down, shaking her shoulders as if at a disco, and more.

It was not so much a political speech as a Zumba routine. Has gabble-prone Cooper, who radiates all the gravity of a TV gameshow’s scoreboard operator, worked out that a leadership election may soon arise?

Little Josh Babarinde MP, the party’s president, was also making himself very obvious, striding about the conference centre with a floppy-haired assistant in tow.

Wasp-waisted Mr Babarinde came over all macho and said: ‘We’ve got to flip the table over and rise up!’

My, my, such bar-brawl talk from one so weedy. He looks as if he could barely flip a beer mat.

Ms Cooper, like Sir Ed, kept talking about dismantling Brexit. It’s their go-to response when they have nothing else to say.

She managed to get through her ‘keynote’ speech on the economy without mentioning welfare spending or defence budgets.

Instead, she bellowed about reducing regulation on businesses. That would be a splendid idea, no doubt, but the Lib Dems have seldom seen a regulation they did not like.