THERE was a time when a whiff of existential angst wafted about Liberal Democrat conferences. The Conservatives under David Cameron had turned all modern and reasonable. Labour under Ed Miliband had shed its authoritarian streak. Were the Lib Dems too indistinct from their Tory coalition partners? Or did they risk becoming a pale replica of Labour? What exactly were they for, again? With little room on either side, positioning the party was like reversing a car into a tight parking space without mirrors. At times it felt the Lib Dems were just splitting the difference between their rivals: before last year’s general election Nick Clegg, then their leader, pledged to bring “heart” to a Tory government or “head” to a Labour one.

By contrast Tim Farron, his successor, enjoys the freedom of the open road. Labour has pirouetted off to the left. Under Theresa May the Conservatives are edging away from some of Mr Cameron’s liberalism. And there is Brexit. Three months after the referendum, right-wing Eurosceptics are setting the agenda, the country is heading for a hard break from the European Union and Labour is putting up little opposition (its MPs are now overwhelmingly for abandoning free movement of people).

Thus there was a purposeful swagger to the Lib Dems who gathered in Brighton from September 17th. The party may have been reduced from 56 to eight MPs in last year’s election—the price of five years in power—but it now holds an uncontested, positive role: as the only unequivocal, nationwide, functional advocate of a properly open Britain. In his speech on September 20th, Mr Farron declared himself ashamed by Britain’s reluctance to take in refugees: “I will not stand by and watch my country become smaller, meaner and more selfish,” he spat. He invited businesses worried about Brexit to ditch the Tories and switch to his own truly “free market, free-trade, pro-business” party. In a portentous passage recalling Tony Blair’s penchant for grand historical narratives he cast British politics today as a giant Kulturkampf between open and closed.

At the heart of the speech were two gambles. The first was a commitment to giving Britons a vote on the Brexit deal Mrs May negotiates, before it is inflicted on them. Plenty take umbrage at the idea. Vince Cable, the former business secretary, called it “seriously disrespectful” to voters. Mr Farron’s other risk was to admire some of Mr Blair’s reforms, like the minimum wage and investment in public services. This was a bold move in a party many of whose members joined as a statement of opposition to Mr Blair (and some of whom had sung “Tony Blair can fuck off and die” at a conference disco the night before).

But so it had to be. With so few MPs, the Lib Dems need stark, attention-grabbingly polarising messages. Such is their puny size and such is the muscular role they seek to play, now is not the time for nuance; something which Lib Dems—who like restraint and middle ways—will have to get used to. Mr Farron is also right to focus on winning voters from Labour. Mrs May remains popular. It was among centre-left voters that Lib Dem support fell most precipitously during the coalition years, observes Mr Clegg. And it is among these folk, in metropolitan Lib Dem-turned-Labour seats like Cambridge and Bristol West, that the opposition’s flaccid anti-Brexit exertions create the largest opening for the party (unlike the 15 broadly Eurosceptic seats in rural south-west England which they lost to the Tories last year).

This deserves to be seen as part of a longer mission: to create a Lib Dem core vote. The party collapsed so ubiquitously last year partly because it does not have any socio-economic base on which to fall back. The Tories have family, faith and flag. Labour has what remains of the industrial working class. The Lib Dems, according to a paper published in 2015 by Mark Pack and David Howarth, two party strategists, need to forge a similar relationship with the well-educated, internationalist urban types who make up the most pro-openness fifth of the British population, but who have no fixed abode in the party-political spectrum. Mr Farron’s uncompromising hostility to Brexit is the substantiation of this strategy.

Harder, faster, liberaler

But is he the right figurehead? The Lib Dem leader’s cheeky-chappy routine is less statesman than Sunday-school teacher. Watching his speech Bagehot half expected him to address the crowd as “boys and girls”, or perhaps whip out a tambourine. He is not a forceful orator; his address was better on the page than in the hall. And while the conference was atwitter about the Lib Dems’ successes (they have won lots of recent council by-elections and gained some 16,000 members immediately after the referendum), in national polls they have made no progress since the election. In London, surely the capital of the putative Lib Dem core vote, they performed abysmally in May’s mayoral election despite fielding a good candidate. Mr Farron may be part of the problem. One year into his leadership, fully 65% of voters do not have any opinion of him, positive or negative; the figure seemingly not improving with time. Even allowing for his party’s Lilliputian profile, that is grim.

Mr Farron has set his party on the right post-referendum course and deserves more time to make a go of it. But if he fails to deliver in the next year his party must be ruthless and replace him. Mr Clegg—who might offer the heft Mr Farron lacks, though he is loyal to his successor—sums up the conditions well: “We have an electoral system that blocks competition; a government that a vast number of people didn’t back and just bromides and platitudes on how Brexit is going to happen. When I write that all down…it just doesn’t seem sustainable to me.” These circumstances make the Lib Dems distinctive. They also intertwine the party’s pro-openness vocation with the national interest like never before. For the party to fall short would be unforgivable.