Ed Davey is a twat. Everyone knows that.

Many still believe the Lib Dem leader has sub-postmasters’ blood on his hands, thanks to his sorry role as minister for postal affairs at the height of the Post Office scandal. Be that as it may, his recent catalogue of woeful adventures in toytown politics is of a much softer hue – and would make a delightful bath-safe vinyl picture book for younger children.

Look! Ed is on his paddleboard! Splosh! Oh no – Ed is in the lake! And has thus ironically raised the sewage level above the approved safety limit. (Acceptable level of Daveys in British lake water? 0 ppm.) His bungee-jumping escapade made Boris Johnson – waving his little Union Jack as he dangled like a sack of laundry from a jammed zip wire – look like Lord Palmerston accepting the Prussian surrender (not an actual historical event) by comparison.

If this week’s annual party conference in Brighton was anything to go by, Davey is getting worse. His feeble attempts to invoke the spectre of fascism in the wake of the illegal-migration protests in Dover and Portsmouth, before leading a chant of ‘We Care! We Fight!’ that would barely have woken a sleeping janitor, were hard to watch.

It ‘feels different this time’, he warned darkly of those protests. Well, yes it does – but not (as Davey claims) because immigration concerns are being amplified by Elon Musk, the new Moriarty or Fu Manchu of the Lib Dem imagination. Rather, what ‘feels different’ is the more than 200,000 people who have entered the country illegally since 2018, the ‘Boriswave’ of nearly four million legal migrants since 2021, the exodus of many thousands of Brits over the same period, and the sudden, almost violent reconfiguration of our demography, our high streets and our schools.

This is what is alarming people, not Elon Musk’s tweets. It’s the collapse of the share of the native population in our major cities to below half. It’s areas like the Lake District – where no significant Muslim population exists – accommodating huge mosques, like grappling hooks from which the population hoping to worship in them can then be winched into place. The past few years, especially for residents of places like Crowborough and now Piddington, have been vastly more horrific than the most alarmist projections that past anti-immigration campaigners felt able to throw at the wall and hope to make stick.

So-called centrists should at least be centred. Yet Davey is perhaps the most eccentric, off-beam figure in the entire House of Commons.

His vibe at the Lib Dem conference was desperate. He called to mind a beleaguered deputy headmaster of a failing school, in the final scene of a comic novel by Kingsley Amis or perhaps Michael Frayn, gallantly trying to wrap up the annual prize-giving with the unpopular school hymn, pressing on unawares while scenes of a hilariously cascading catastrophe unfold behind him.

Given that they have always been regarded as something of a joke, it is remarkable to consider how far the Lib Dems have fallen. In the bad old days, when such things were both infra dig and technically illegal, the Liberals often seemed to attract the politically ambitious who sadly had a lot to lose should their private lives come under too much scrutiny. David Steel’s 12 years as leader – from 1976 to 1988 – were at least free from the kind of notoriety that Jeremy Thorpe had brought to the party.

I remember it being all too easy to characterise the Liberals’ conferences in that decade as preoccupied with legalising Class-B drugs and other student-activist concerns. Then the arrival of the Social Democratic Party – which would later merge with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems – elevated their esteem to a degree it is easy to forget. Steel’s rallying cry from the 1981 SDP / Liberal Alliance conference – ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government!’ – sounds pathetic in hindsight, but, without the Falklands War, it is not inconceivable that they might have been in with a shout.

Then came Paddy Ashdown. Regardless of his own blind spots and occasional misjudgements, this was a leader of such gravitas, experience, confidence, proven nerve and character that I am tempted to say that he was like Hyperion to a satyr next to Ed Davey. After he left the House of Commons, Ashdown was a plausible candidate for the secretary-general of NATO. Davey would hardly be credible as a candidate for moderator on Mumsnet. His main experience of the North Atlantic would be falling in it.

Charles Kennedy, too, was a man for whom I am unapologetic in my admiration. Though he was well to the left of me politically, his sharpness (when sober) was never less than impressive. The speed with which he responded to a facetious suggestion from Billy Bragg on Question Time – that he join forces with Boris Johnson – was, I think, the single most quick-witted reply I’ve ever seen on that show. The last Kennedy–Johnson ticket, he said, had proven inauspicious.

Tragically – I think that is not too big a word – Kennedy’s drinking problem did for him, and the subsequent loss of his seat to Ian Blackford in 2015 was a disaster, if only because it brought to parliament the biggest windbag in Scotland (and I include in that category actual bagpipes).

Since then, it has been like watching once plucky contenders for a Champions League place start to slip down into the lower tiers. Although still popular among certain bien-pensant constituencies in the south-west that have yet to be ‘Piddingtoned’, Davey is now widely regarded as a joke outside of his clique. And, judging by the lack of enthusiasm with which the Lib Dems joined in his painfully weak ‘We Care! We Fight!’ chant, increasingly within it, too.

How the middling have fallen.