FOR A political party that has lost two-thirds of its voters and four-fifths of its MPs since 2010, “we were right” is a bold claim. Yet during the Liberal Democrats’ annual conference in Bournemouth this week, the sentiment came up repeatedly. “Just look at our record of being right, but standing alone,” stormed its former leader, Tim Farron, to rapturous applause.

Britain’s third party prides itself on being contrary and correct. It opposed the Iraq war and claims to have foreseen the banking crisis. Joining a coalition with the Tories in 2010 was a matter of patriotic duty, it still insists. Opposition to Brexit, on which it has campaigned hard, falls into the same boat.

Yet voters are hardly appreciative. The Lib Dems lost 4.5m votes between 2010 and 2017. The attitude of the party to its stint in government with the Conservatives in 2010-15 swings between pride and shame. Nick Clegg, its leader during the coalition years, gave a trenchant defence of the party’s time in power, while admitting that he had made it too easy for David Cameron, the then prime minister, to shove him into an electoral woodchipper. This sometimes translates into an air of sanctimony. The party’s current leader, Sir Vince Cable, described the Lib Dems’ record in Augean terms: “We still have to scrub ourselves hard to get rid of the smell of clearing up other people’s mess.”

Finding ways to wash off the stench occupied the delegates in Bournemouth. A graduate tax would iron out an unfair feature of university-tuition fees, in which those with high salaries are able to escape a 9% levy on their income by paying off their student debts early. Norman Lamb, an MP who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, waved a free medical prescription in the air—one of many benefits lavished on the elderly regardless of wealth. “How can you possibly justify this perk when an 18-year-old with a long-term condition, like cystic fibrosis, has to pay for theirs?” he demanded. He also proposed a plan to give tax breaks to those firms that improve their provisions for mental health. And a second referendum on Brexit—or a first referendum on the facts, as the Liberal Democrats like to term it—would be offered.

All these policies would make Britain a little bit better. But when Labour is proposing to overhaul the entire economy and Theresa May’s Conservatives are promising a social revolution, technocratic fixes struggle to whip up much excitement. At one point, Sir Vince earnestly called on Britain to recall the “pioneering spirit” of Milton Keynes, a drab dormitory town. At times the Liberal Democrats resemble nothing so much as a think-tank with a parliamentary wing.

It is not all gloom. The party now has over 100,000 members, two-thirds more than in 2015. Staffers talk excitedly about overtaking the Conservatives, whose elderly membership is—often literally—dying. But Labour’s membership has grown to more than half a million in the same period, driven by returning lefties who blanched at the excesses of New Labour and young supporters becoming involved in politics for the first time. In Bournemouth the young were noticeable mostly by their absence. Paddy Ashdown, another former leader, featured on a panel about winning over the youth vote. He is 76. Most attendees were pale and stale, although not overwhelmingly male. The number of black members was roughly equal to the number of middle-aged women in blue and yellow EU berets.

The Lib Dems are stuck in the middle, offering a sensible critique and suggesting that voters should spurn false promises of radicalism from both left and right. Sir Vince hammered this theme home in his closing speech. “What the country needs is hope and realism,” he thundered.

“ ‘I told you so’ has historically been quite good for the Lib Dems,” points out one party member, somewhat cynically. The Liberal Democrats are correct that the post-Brexit wonderland promised during the referendum campaign is unlikely to come to pass. Whether voters will show much gratitude for the party’s foresight in this matter is another question.