Owing to a time clash, geopolitical analysts had a choice. They could watch Donald Trump address the United Nations; or in Brighton they could feel the throb of real power as Sir Edward Davey gave his leader’s speech to the Lib Dem conference.

No contest, really.

Sir Ed, 60, swaggered to the lectern, absorbing activists’ applause the way a rectangle of flower arrangers’ Oasis mops up water. His face did an ‘aw, folks’ fake-modesty thing. A statesmanlike hand was raised to acknowledge the adoring masses. Portentous nodding and pursing of lips.

We mortals felt grateful to be in the presence of greatness.

Mind you, given the fund-raising speech that had just been given by the Lib Dems’ treasurer, a Sloane called Tilly, things could only improve.

She had drawn a contrast between Nigel Farage and the late Dolly Parton. ‘I’m having a little giggle here,’ squeaked Tilly. The audience did not laugh. From the conference hall there just came the occasional cough and a grappling with throat-lozenge blister packs.

Sir Ed was in no mood for giggles. His speech opened thus: ‘Something big and dangerous is happening in our country. Hundreds of thugs in black shirts and balaclavas are marching on our streets.’

This was delivered with manly grinding of jaw. He narrowed his eyes, as a border collie will when enjoying the draught in the back of a farmer’s pick-up.

He kept adopting that expression in a speech which obsessively mentioned Reform and Mr Farage. Oswald Mosley and the National Front were also thrown into the mix. Sir Ed did not quite claim that Mr Farage was leading those balaclava’d thugs who marched in Dover and Portsmouth. That would have been defamatory, indeed untrue. But the juxtaposition was sly. Sneaky. There is a surprising amount of that in soggy Sir Edward.

As a veteran of his philippics – a connoisseur, over the years, of this prancing goose’s gaseous ventings – I’d say this was the leanest of the lot. The one interesting passage was about the deadening effect of mobile telephones on our lives. But the rest of it was narrow, mawkish, untruthful, self-important and lacking in originality.

Although Farage received numerous mentions, the Greens were not referred to once. This was odd. They are surely the greater electoral threat to Sir Ed’s mouldering Lib Dems. Should he not have taken this chance to say how he differs from the Greens’ Zack Polanski?

Instead we heard, for the umpteenth time, about Sir Ed’s home life and the admirable way he and his wife have reared a disabled son.

He reheated lines from last year’s speech (or was it the one in 2024?) about how we must not let Trump’s America become Farage’s Britain. Sir Ed made another of his sallies against Elon Musk. It is a source of wonder that the world’s richest man has not yet been brought to smoking ruin by the Don Quixote of Lib Demmery.

The economy’s woes were blamed on Brexit. Rejoining Europe would solve everything. Two points of information: in 2016, there were 162,000 jobs in the City and now the figure is something like 223,000; our biggest export is services and since Brexit they have risen by £170billion. This, too, was not mentioned by Sir Ed.

Behind him sat his MPs. Not all of them managed to look rapt. Esher’s Monica Harding was drooping a bit at the chops. Cheltenham’s Max Wilkinson kept rubbing his ears and nose. Harpenden and Berkhamsted’s Victoria Collins remembered to smile but did so when Sir Ed was raging at fascists. Not now, Victoria!

Best of class was Maidenhead’s Joshua Reynolds, who looks about 19. He was a model of soapy adoration. Good boy.

‘We are in the fight of our lives,’ Sir Ed kept saying. ‘We. Are. In. The. Fight. Of. Our. Lives.’

The staleness of this speech suggests that the one fighting for his life was the pot-tummied booby making it. What an underwhelming week he has had.