LONDON — Ask anyone in British politics right now about the Liberal Democrats, and chances are the response will range from dismissive, via condescending, to downright rude.

After electoral collapse in 2015, and with their internationalist, Europhile ideals lying in the wreckage of the U.K.’s vote for Brexit, the party is going through a rough patch — to put it mildly.

But for Nick Clegg, the former party leader who took the Lib Dems into coalition with the Conservatives between 2010 and 2015, hope springs eternal.

"We are very much in the calm after the storm on Brexit,” he told POLITICO ahead of the party’s conference in Brighton, which begins Saturday. “There are going to be lots of ups and downs. But I can easily envisage the Liberal Democrats, in the next decade or so, in some shape or form, back in power.”

For years the third party of British politics, renowned for its diligent MPs, principled stand against the Iraq War, and a centrist, ‘best-of-both-worlds’ approach, the Lib Dems were propelled to power in 2010 when the Tories failed to secure a majority and brought them into a coalition.

Almost immediately, they took a pasting at the polls. Clegg was maligned for going back on a pledge never to increase university tuition fees. At the 2015 general election, their vote collapsed. From a high of 57 MPs in the coalition years, the Lib Dems ended up with just eight.

The trauma of election day still weighs heavy on the party. Clegg resigned as leader after the election, replaced by the left-leaning Tim Farron.

In the year-and-a-bit since, signs of recovery have been modest. They won a respectable 15 percent of the vote in local government elections in May and have been taking back council seats in by-elections. They also enjoyed a surge in membership when, days after the Brexit vote, Farron pledged to fight to keep Britain in the EU.

But otherwise, the leader’s approach so far has been to rebuild the party’s core vote in its former heartland in England’s rural south-west. To appeal locally, Lib Dem candidates have been outspoken about hotel taxes and Cornish language funding. So far, so small.

But there is another vision of Lib Dem recovery which has been gaining traction since the referendum. It involves the small matter of a grand realignment of the Center-left.

Another former leader, Paddy Ashdown, sees deep crisis but also rare opportunity in the Brexit vote.

Ashdown, one of Westminster’s most respected elder statesmen, was born during World War II, served with the Royal Marines, and was EU High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 2000s. But, speaking to POLITICO on the balcony of his south London apartment, he says it is the present era that he finds “extremely frightening.”

“It reminds me horribly of the 1930s: fractured, the structures broken, politics disregarded and disrespected, a public revolt against the establishment, and those that shout loudest with the strongest messages — which are nearly always ugly messages — prosper.”

In such an environment, Ashdown believes, Centrists like the Lib Dems must evolve to survive.

“Starting from eight seats, will we gain sufficient momentum and strength to be able to alter the electoral balance by the next election? No,” he says. “Die for the Lib Dems though I will, they are necessary but not sufficient. We have to start building the wider Center-left.”

To such an end, Ashdown founded an organization called More United after the Brexit referendum. It is not, he insists, an embryonic political party. In fact, he believes the days of the political party as we know it may be numbered.

“Political parties have become separated from their movements, they have become narrow sects that gather at the seaside for the special pleasure of sitting in large halls together celebrating their purity,” he said, quickly adding: “I’m not talking about the Lib Dems necessarily here [perhaps recalling that the Lib Dem conference takes place in the quintessential seaside town of Brighton] but all of us.”

Restless reformers

More United will instead take its cues from Italy’s 5Star Movement — but with a progressive, internationalist agenda. It has 35,000 members already, Ashdown says, is crowdfunded, and will support — financially and with manpower — political candidates from any party who share its ideals.

Many wonder whether Ashdown, who came close to securing a pact with Tony Blair’s Labour in the 1990s, is laying the ground for some future collaboration. Many of Labour’s more centrist MPs could, after all, be looking for a new home as the party fractures under Jeremy Corbyn and proposed boundary changes slash the number of MPs by 50.

“Maybe More United is there to make their transition easier for them,” Ashdown agrees. “But I’m not saying to people, in order to join the new Jerusalem you need to leave your own tribe.”

The Lib Dems have often been plagued by talk of mergers with Labour. Farron has made it clear that his party would welcome defecting Labour MPs, but sources close to the leader bristle at the idea of any imminent alignment of centrist Labour and the Lib Dems. The party has a growing membership that it wants to capitalize on: Since the referendum, Farron’s pro-EU message has seen more than 19,000 new members sign up, taking it to nearly 80,000. This year’s conference is expected to be its biggest ever.

Clegg shares Ashdown’s assessment of Brexit as both crisis and opportunity.

Theresa May’s government, which includes many of his former Cabinet colleagues, “has a much shorter sell-by date” than anyone currently thinks, he says.

“People think that government has greater solidity than it really does. It is a government, without a mandate, built on a fault line,” he says, referring to the Tories’ internal divisions over Brexit and wafer-thin majority of 12.

“Eventually it will be paralyzed and at that point I think there will be a real appetite from the British people for someone to step up to the plate to sort things out.”

Clegg has even mooted some form of government of national unity to carry Britain through the Brexit transition.

If that day comes, perhaps Clegg’s bold prediction could yet come true. But for now, the slow work of rebuilding begins again in Brighton.

Clegg does not believe the voters who turned away from them in droves last year will hold a grudge. People, he said, seemed “ready to move on.”

“Our task now is to rediscover the zeal of the insurgents, of a reforming party,” he said. “Tim Farron is ideally placed to reassert the identity of the Liberal Democrats as a party of restless, radical reformers. But you don’t reap the dividends overnight.”