AT FIRST SIGHT, David Beckham and Charles Kennedy would not seem to have much in common. One is a man often accused of being amiable but vacuous, who sports an odd haircut and heads a national team that persistently fails to fulfil its potential. The other plays in midfield for Real Madrid.

There is, though, a subtle connection. At a conference on celebrity culture sponsored by the University of Paisley last week the audience heard a paper titled “Father, why has thou forsaken me? Postmodernism, desire and dissatisfaction. A case study of David Beckham’s meaning” and was then invited to debate, according to one account, whether this famous footballer is “the modern Christ or a 21st-century King Arthur”.

At the Liberal Democrat conference in Blackpool this week the discussion behind the scenes will be whether Mr Kennedy is really the political messiah for his party that he once appeared and if he is still the man most likely to locate the Holy Grail of power. This “leadership question” is mostly conducted in whispers, but that it is there at all is significant. It represents an implicit acknowledgement by the more thoughtful Liberal Democrats that they did not do as well at the general election as they should have done.

These logically minded Liberal Democrats are right to conclude that the conference should not be so much celebrating the party’s modest success as working out how to do better next time. They are also correct in recognising that their party is widely viewed as occupying space to the left of Tony Blair’s new Labour and that this is not the place from which to appeal to the centre ground or the softer elements among voters who have stuck with the Conservatives.

I am not sure, however, that “the leadership question” is the best device for them to use to change the direction of the party. Mr Kennedy remains fairly popular with the electorate, has the personal credibility with most activists and members to lead the Liberal Democrats in a different way if he were so minded — and there is no successor who could command a consensus within the parliamentary party. The so-called leadership question can lead only to one answer. He stays.

It is also the wrong question. The true problem with and for the Liberal Democrats is not with the leadership but the followership. The party has not convinced the public of its desire to hold office at the highest level because it is not, deep down, itself convinced that it can either form or serve as a junior partner in a national government — or even that this would be desirable if it were to involve the painful compromises with high principle that power would entail. The party suffers from a dire poverty of ambition.

A comparison between the celebrity-culture conference last week and the Liberal Democrats is again instructive. As well as the Beckham session, academics also delivered talks titled “News, celebrity and the Michael Jackson verdict — a vortextual analysis”, “The pragmatics of fame: visibility, public memory and Celine Dion” and also (my favourite) “International photo-models as local celebrities in 1960s Finland”. Such an agenda, with respect to the fine scholars concerned, does represent a strange sense of intellectual priorities.

The same can sometimes be the case with the Liberal Democrats. Three years ago the party’s conference programme included whether or not to lower the age at which pornography can legally be sold to 16. This event was enlivened by the epic line of one speech which opened: “Conference, I work in the sex industry” (perhaps disappointingly, the woman concerned was employed by Ann Summers). Two years ago I sat through most of a debate on the alleged decline of the local cinema (and miraculously maintained a pulse at the end of it). Last year a woman attempted to raise a point of order in one session complaining vociferously that: “As a white witch, I am very disturbed at some of the literature being distributed outside this hall.”

This year, to be fair, the party is running a tighter ship but there will be a 20-minute address this afternoon from someone called Seif Shariff Hamad, who is (we are told) the Civic United Front candidate for President of Zanzibar. This chap (assuming it is a chap) may be a splendid soul, but it is not quite like having Bill Clinton along as your international guest speaker.

Now some people, including my esteemed colleague Matthew Parris (with whom I am not about to start another spat), would state that sexual liberation, local cinemas and Zanzibar are precisely what the Liberal Democrats are and should be about and it would be a tragedy if this eccentricity were eliminated from them.

Which is fair enough if a party is content to sit in the comfort zone of permanent opposition and is not interested in occupying ministerial positions — but it will not otherwise suffice. The electorate is entitled to believe, as the conference-season poll conducted by Populus for The Times again reveals, that the Liberal Democrats are nice people but not serious politicians.

It is this followership question that MPs who, quite properly, if they hunger for the chance to make big changes to British public life, should focus on for the next four years. The policy review that Mr Kennedy has set in process is a sound initiative but it should be accompanied by a sweeping party review designed to install a more professional and realistic approach to politics.

The Liberal Democrats should not want to appear rather like an institution that attracts those for whom care in the community has failed. Mr Kennedy might not be a modern Christ or even a 21st-century King Arthur. He would not, however, do his party any harm by treating it as if he were a reincarnated Stalin.

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