Here at Brighton the storm over Northern Rock has been no more than distant thunder in the hills. I am at a Liberal Democrat conference – as I was 15 years ago in Harrogate on Black Wednesday: treated by delegates at the time as an irritating distraction, like the sound of passing police sirens in the streets outside. As kingdoms totter and citadels fall, Liberal Democrats get on with their knitting. It is – depending on one’s viewpoint – comforting, or deeply weird.

And in the media and political world beyond, the regiment who march under the banner “it was always inevitable” are now in full cry: the PostHoc Grenadiers. “A financial tsunami” in the making for years, said one commentator on Monday. Now that Northern Rock has happened, we learn that the likelihood was obvious beforehand to all with eyes to see.

Gee, thanks. At least Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ Shadow Chancellor, was good enough to share with the nation his forebodings before, rather than after, recent events. As for the other retrospective inevitabilists, perhaps those now clucking wisely would draw our attention to the advance warnings they gave. A few did, most didn’t. We could sort the sheep from the goats by requiring a little box in the top right-hand corner of the columnists’ page, headed “Those prophecies in full”, and reminding us of when the writer first drew to our attention what was apparently blindingly obvious.

In Brighton’s charmless hangar of a conference centre I sat through the Lib Dems’ environment debate, numbed by the banality and bewildered by their platform backdrop of two fried eggs, sunny-side up. I was listening to Chris Huhne. Now the party’s environment spokesman, Mr Huhne aims to be the next Lib Dem Leader. I am tortured by guilt about this man, because ages ago I described him in The Times as “indefinably ghastly”, sneakily failing to subtantiate the slur. A noted blogger, Paul Linford, took me to task for this – with justice.

So I’ve been approaching conference-goers and putting to each that eternal question: what is it about this clever, capable and blameless man that so unnerves? There has been much chewing of the lip. Here’s a selection of replies:

“Is he related to Dr Liam Fox?”

“He looks like Huckleberry Hound.”

“You long to knock him over, just to trigger an unpremeditated response.”

“I shouldn’t say this because he’s a friend, but Chris isn’t very . . . interesting.”

These do not add up to a reasoned case against a chap leading his party. Accordingly and unreservedly I withdraw the word “ghastly”. But may I leave, hanging teasingly unattached, the word “indefinably”?

Mr Huhne interrupted my reverie with a podium warm-up joke. If Mr Blair was “Phoney Tony”, he told delegates, shouldn’t the new Tory leader be “Sham Cam”? In the Commons, Hansard notes an amused House’s response as “[LAUGHTER]”. For Lib Dems, “[TITTER]” would do.

And, finally, the peroration. “Let’s get real about rail!” cried Mr Huhne. In politics, alliteration is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Not that Mr Huhne is the only wannabe leader here at Brighton. Yesterday, in the foyer of the Grand Hotel, I chanced upon a young man with a strange, wild, desperate look in his eyes, rushing this way and that. “I’m looking for a fringe event that doesn’t have Nick Clegg in it,” he wailed.

Those readers who combine an interest in the wilder shores of party politics with a facility for accessing audio on the internet, might follow www.pnpjamaica.org to hear the (Jamaican) People’s National Party’s thrilling anthem to their 2007 conference which, as in Brighton, began on Sunday. My family lived in Kingston in the early 1970s, and it sounds as if little has changed in the island’s boisterous, two-party, politics-as-warfare culture. Minimal policy content and a toxic combination of the worst of British knockabout politics with the worst of the African gang mentality (plus an internecine battle of trade-union affiliation thrown in) were, I used to believe, decades behind our own political scene.

But maybe Jamaica leads the way? The island’s great poet-comedienne, the late Louise Bennett, “Miss Lou”, used to parody the windy posturing of the island’s politicians through an invented personage, the Minister of Positive Action. Can it be long before new Labour hits upon this reassuring portfolio?

Meanwhile, Lib Dems – catch a blast of the PNP’s Full Speed Ahead, try to imagine Ming sashaying up to the lectern to that calypso beat, and weep.

Listen to the the top ten political anthems

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