Was that it? Sir Vince’s ‘exotic spresm’ leaves conference cold

Bizarre, isn’t it? Towards the end of July, Parliament broke up for six weeks. Then, at the start of this month, it returned for all of seven days – only to break up once again. Right now, there are no MPS in the Commons, and no peers in the Lords. No debates, and no votes. And why?

Because the Lib Dems have been away in Brighton holding their party conference. Yes, that’s right. The Lib Dems. A party with just 12 of Parliament’s 650 MPS. Yet the absence of those 12 Lib Dems apparently means that the 638 non-lib Dems have to take the week off. What a peculiar convention.

It’s like every Tesco in Britain shutting for the week, just because a couple of shelf-stackers from Milton Keynes have gone to Riga on a stag do.

Then again, maybe it would be unfair for the Commons to carry on without the Lib Dems. After all, their MPS might miss a crucial Brexit vote. Imagine.

Still, never mind. It’s all over now. The Lib Dem conference stumbled to its conclusion yesterday afternoon, with a speech by the party leader, Sir Vince Cable. If, as expected, he steps down next year, this conference speech will have been his last. Sadly, it didn’t go entirely to plan.

His big theme, inevitably, was Brexit: how badly it was going, and how badly it needed to be stopped. Twenty-four hours earlier, his people had given the newspapers a preview of his key line. And it was quite the show-stopper. The Tories, Sir Vince was due to say, simply couldn’t wait to savour the “erotic spasm” of Brexit.

Erotic spasm. Dear Lord. With mounting dread, journalists waited to hear one of Parliament’s most senior figures conjure this unhappy image out loud. Remarkably, it was even worse than they feared.

“For the fundamentalists, the costs of Brexit have always been irrelevant,” said Sir Vince. “Years of economic pain, justified by the exotic spresm of …”

The exotic spresm. That’s what he said. Not erotic spasm. Exotic spresm.

The room stared. What had happened? Had the sudden sight of this phrase on the autocue proven so alarming that Sir Vince’s brain had simply refused to compute it?

I don’t know whether neuroscientists have a term for such a phenomenon. But if they don’t, they could probably call it an exotic spresm.

Poor Sir Vince. There was, it had turned out, one thing more embarrassing than a politician saying “erotic spasm”: a politician not saying “erotic spasm”.

Maybe he was just nervous. Even the most experienced politicians can get the jitters. To be frank, it was a wobbly performance throughout. He also pronounced kowtowing as kowtowting, and Lewisham as Lewicom.

Still, look on the bright side. Towards the end, he described Labour and the Tories as “intolerant cults”. At least he didn’t mispronounce that.

Has there been a more open goal in recent British politics? Some 16 million people voted to stay in the EU in June 2016. Yet the one party committed to reversing Brexit by means of another referendum has failed to make any inroads. The Lib Dems, whose annual conference ended yesterday with a national shrug of indifference, had almost half the electorate to work with at the election last June, yet they won just 12 seats and 7 per cent of the popular vote.

Since then, even as the governing party has torn itself apart over Brexit and the Labour opposition has been riven from top to bottom with allegations of anti-semitism and hard-left intimidation, most voters have remained immune to the charms of the Lib Dems. The latest polls show the party struggles to reach double-digit support. Why is this? In the early Eighties, when Labour last fell under the spell of the hard Left and the Tories were fighting over the direction of economic policy, the centrist SDP rose to 50 per cent in the polls. Today, the Lib Dems have failed to offer a coherent alternative to the two big parties even when they are in disarray.

Sir Vince Cable, who took over as leader after the last general election and will be stepping down before the next, has failed to inspire or articulate an alternative vision for the country. His main argument is that Theresa May is pursuing Brexit when she knows it to be wrong; he is failing to understand that she is doing so because that is what the country voted for. Even a heavily trailed insult aimed at Tory Brexiteers backfired.

Sir Vince said people felt sorry for Mrs May, a bad emotion for any prime minister to elicit. However, the party leader who deserves to be pitied is Sir Vince himself.