If you are ever plagued by grave existential doubts about the utter meaninglessness of life and why you have been put on this earth, spare a moment’s sympathy for the Liberal Democrat party gathering in Brighton this weekend who are collectively in the same boat.

Their conference kicked off under a yellow fug of mediocrity: the latest opinion polls suggest there are exactly 27 people left in the country who remember the Lib Dems exist at all, and all of them live in disused Cornish tin mines. Their current opinion poll standing is 14% and even that figure is probably boosted by people like my late father, who loathed pollsters and always gave them the most absurd and untrue answers.

That 14%, by the way, if replicated in a general election would remove around one-third of their parliamentary representation of 63 seats. It is quite likely fewer people will vote for them than the 5m-odd who did so when the party was led by a chap whose name was linked to the shooting of a homosexual’s dog. Worse still, in a way, for the Lib Dems, this situation has been arrived at through a terrible, debilitating gradualness, like a frog being boiled alive in a saucepan. The party keeps doing badly in by-elections and local elections, but not so badly that anyone has felt sufficiently concerned to bundle Menzies Campbell off to the glue factory and replace him with something possessed with dynamism - Nick Clegg, perhaps, or a bowl of pea and ham soup.

The vote and the opinion polls edge ever downwards, but never enough to precipitate a crisis. You might well argue that the Lib Dem failure to win the Ealing Southall by-election was a truly disastrous result, far more injurious than if it had been experienced by the Conservative or Labour parties: the Lib Dems depend utterly upon scoring such victories and have become used to doing so. Not any more.

Meanwhile, their more attractive and distinct policies - especially the green stuff - is cheerfully appropriated by the right and left. What, these days, is there to distinguish the Liberal Democrats from the two main parties, aside from the fading recollection that they were against the war in Iraq?

I said they deserve our sympathy, but only up to a point. There is a joke told by the American comedian, Emo Phillips. His German girlfriend told him she loved New York, especially the bagels: “They are delicious - but you just can’t get them in Germany.” And Phillips replied: “Well, whose fault is that?”

Much the same might be said to the Lib Dems this weekend. They binned a popular, intelligent and quietly charismatic leader, Charles Kennedy, out of political correctness. They put in his place someone without a blemish - and without much else, either. And they march silently on towards a massacre.

- A study commissioned by the government has criticised the pneumatic cookery writer Nigella Lawson for making her recipes too difficult by using “long sentences” and “complicated words”. I suppose it would be going too far to say that anyone so thick that they cannot understand Lawson’s simple and elegant grammar should be left to die of rickets, as a service to mankind. She’s hardly Marcel Proust, is she?

But the morons might be pointed in the direction of Gordon Ramsay; the same survey reckoned that even a foetus should be able to follow his dull, monosyllabic instructions. Quite why the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills should be spending your and my money assessing cookery writers for their “readability and writing style” eludes me entirely.

I have my doubts that the ill-educated public, suddenly gripped by hunger pangs, stampede to the shops in order to buy Nigella’s books so that they can rustle up “slut red raspberries in chardonnay jelly” for “tea” - and then get horribly disillusioned because they cannot understand the word “lucent” halfway through the recipe.

Lawson is not primarily a cook, still less a public information service. She is selling a kind of lifestyle. Her margarita ice cream, incidentally, is beyond perfection.

Vote here for our man on the moon

The government is being urged by the British National Space Centre to spend more than £50m to put a man on the moon by 2020. Which man in particular they haven’t told us. Perhaps we will be allowed to vote on the issue, in which case I nominate the journalist Richard Littlejohn. He’d like it up there. Low crime levels, not too many immigrants, very few homosexuals, restrained - not to say entirely absent - atmosphere.

Littlejohn could float around the place for aeons, playing golf against himself and hectoring rocks. We could check on his progress every 25 years or so. And it would be comforting when we gazed upwards on an autumn evening, knowing that somewhere on that softly glowing yellow orb Richard was stamping around, protecting the moon from sexual perverts, abortionists, murderous Muslims and health and safety fanatics. Or maybe the government should save itself a shedload of money and choose the Liberal Democrat MP and Cheeky Girl boyfriend Lembit Opik - who I believe already lives in the Oort Cloud, that mysterious band of gaseous material which hovers for ever on the outer edge of our solar system, just beyond Pluto.

Doctor? Back of the queue, mate

A builder who broke his ankle in three places will not be treated by the National Health Service for the intense pain he is suffering unless he gives up smoking. Doctors insist that John Nuttall’s recovery from an operation would be hampered by his habit. To which the answer is: never mind, why don’t you give it a go? Nuttall contracted MRSA on a previous stay in hospital. An ankle operation seems the least the hopeless quacks might do in recompense. It is time we started treating doctors the way they treat us. Doctors in supermarkets should be made to wait six weeks at the checkout till for an appointment and then have half their purchases thrown out of the trolley for being “unhealthy”. In off-licences they should not be served at all. In banks they should be told that they’re not getting any money until they agree to be on call at weekends and evenings and stop killing the rest of us through their incompetence. Remember - 30,000 people a year die as a result of medical mistakes. Nuttall is probably better off hobbling around in pain.

- The Archbishop of Canterbury has drawn an equivalence between teenagers who go around stabbing and shooting one another in gangs and middle-class kids who are urged to academic and sporting success by their parents. Both are under similar pressures in a very real sense, he pronounced, no doubt stroking his lovely ecclesiastical beard. Rowan Williams is a charming and very erudite man. He has just completed a lengthy book on the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom he greatly admires. I assume he has a special regard for The Idiot.

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