The Liberal Democrats have missed an opportunity at their party conference in Bournemouth. It is the one week of the year when they can be sure of getting some media attention. This was Nick Clegg’s big chance before the election campaign to create a clearer identity for his party, and it was bungled. The lasting damage will probably not be as great as the immediate headlines suggest. The squabbles mainly reached the party elite and the media, rather than deeper or wider.

On a Richter scale of conference rows, this week’s rank as perhaps a four, compared with the eight or nine of the bad-tempered arguments over nuclear defence in Eastbourne in 1986 or the battles over the SDP/Liberal merger in 1987-88, let alone Labour’s civil war conferences in the early 1980s and the Tories’ near-death experience in 2003. That said, what should have been a boost to the Lib Dems will not materialise.

Mr Clegg has stumbled into the familiar problem of previous Lib Dem leaders, notably Paddy Ashdown: impatience leading to loose talk and tension with prickly MPs and activists not wanting to be taken for granted. Mr Clegg is to blame for his maladroit reference to “savage” cuts, and for his clumsy handling of his obvious point that the abolition of tuition fees may now have to be delayed. He failed to tackle this issue directly in his conference speech, which was competent and well received, but lacked bite. The only half-memorable phrase was “progressive austerity”.

More serious has been the fuss over Vince Cable’s proposal for a “mansions tax” on properties worth more than £1 million. Some MPs have resented Mr Cable’s tendency to go it alone and many were annoyed by his failure to consult on such a sensitive plan. It has punctured his previously unassailable image.

The result has been to create an image of muddle. But because the fuss is more about an absence of consultation than an ideological divide, it should fade. Voters pay much less attention to rows, or party conferences in general, than the media and political worlds imagine. Mr Clegg said that the one policy delegates should take from the conference was a commitment to fairer taxes.

There is a positive message here that should appeal as much to low-paid voters in the South West seats that the Lib Dems are trying to defend against the Tories as to the northern industrial seats that they are trying to win from Labour. That strategy stands, but it has been obscured this week by self-inflicted mistakes.

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