He chose to concentrate on the inadequacies of service provision for the mentally ill.  It was not an obvious crowd-puller for a new leader and therefore provided an interesting perspective on Nick as a rather unusual politician.  I had to meet him at the station and drive him to the venue – no ministerial cars then.

The audience were struck by his passion on this issue and that he should have chosen such a relatively unsexy subject.  Their reception was warm, but doubtless they thought that this was yet another set of noble aspiration from a third party leader who would never have the opportunity to deliver on them.

Last year he came back to the same conference and was able to tell them how – even within huge constraints on public expenditure – the new coalition government was determined to tackle this issue with its “No Health Without Mental Health” strategy targeting an additional £400 million to ensure better access to psychological therapies.

It was reported yesterday that the Department of Health has provided £16 million as part of this initiative for the Time to Change campaign, aimed at children in schools and youth clubs and via social networking websites.

I recently posted a link on Facebook to a story by Mark Pack on Liberal Democrat Voice about research done by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) on the income of the richest one percent in the UK.  I was prompted because it reinforced one of my previous themes in this blog that we need to look wider than FTSE 100 bosses when criticising people for disproportionate pay increases.

The CEP research showed the remorseless increase in share of national income going to the richest one percent since 1979.  But it also showed that chief executives of public companies are middle of the road when it comes to these increases.

A Manchester United footballer saw his salary increase 164 percent between 2000/1 and 2008/10 (there isn’t data available for each job tracked for every year).  Top barristers’ earnings went up 87 percent, the BBC Director General’s pay funded out of a virtual poll tax called the licence fee went up by 84 percent.

The editor of the left-leaning Guardian saw his pay go up 80 percent – same editor, declining circulation, it seems a strange form of performance-related pay.

A typical Chief Executive saw his (or her) pay go up 53 percent in the same period, while the Cabinet Secretary’s pay went up 42 percent, and the Governor of the Bank of England by a relatively modest 28 percent.

The Prime Minister’s salary went from £116,436 in 2002 to £150,000 in 2010 (a rise of 29 percent) – and David Cameron and his cabinet ministers all took a deliberate five percent pay cut when they came into office.

Widening pay differentials are a cancer in our modern society – but we need to cast the net wider than executive pay.

There was such a flood of comments on my facebook entry that I thought them worth recording – names initialised to protect the innocent:

DS: Agree 100%. The money Footballers get is obscene

DO: I should really point out that the gap has come from people at the top getting more, not the people at the bottom getting less

SC: It is clear to see where we should be taxing, but how do you achieve it without them upping and leaving for Hong Kong?

DO: We are already taxing them at 50%, plus 1% NI for those who earn the money (that is, where their income is pay not interest) plus 12.8% more from their employer.

TK: Don’t believe these numbers. It only looks at wages. The top 1% don’t just rely on ‘wages’, their real income is far higher than this and their share of ‘wealth ownership’ is likely to be even higher than 14% – some figures being quoted are in the range of 75% to 90%.

DO: Wealth inequality is always higher than income inequality because the poor have a much higher marginal propensity to consume.

Sandy Walkington: But all this shows why we should not be cutting the 50p tax rate and why we should move to the marginal rate for capital gains tax to be the same as for income tax so games cannot be played with the way people are played. I would also change inheritance tax to tax recipients rather than the estate with tax allowances just like in income tax and capital gains tax – if wealth is then spread on death, little or no tax, if it is left concentrated, the recipients pay tax just as for any other income.

JM: I rememberthe days of supertax for the very rich. Can we bring it back, particularly for footballers and over-paid so called stars such as Clarkson?

MC: Go on then… What tax rate do you want to hit them with?

TK: You can’t fix society with changing tax rates. There is something very wrong in a society where footballers and so called celebs get paid in a week what most nurses and teachers don’t get paid in a year. Taxes are nothing but a mechanism to keep the fiat currency system going which sucks the wealth out of the productive section of society – or steal from them – and gives it over to the non-productive parasites of our society, such as bankers, MPs, local councils, etc.

PE: So basically this report tells us what we all knew; that we are being screwed by the financial sector. Camping out in the grounds of St. Pauls is not going to stop it, only the government can fix this and I don’t see the willpower to do it from any major government. The problem is that very few people, including the banks themselves know exactly what is going on. The whole system needs a major overhaul.

SM: ‎Sandy Walkington but the cgt is fairly easy to avoid (by not crystallising the gain) which is why the treasury recommended 28% as the rate which would maximise revenue.

SM: Deborah – why is it ‘obscene’. do you think it better for the owenrs of football clubs to get more money and the players less?

JM: As most football clubs actually LOSE money it might not be such a bad thing

PE: The footballer thing is a distraction from the real issue. Very few people get paid for playing sport, and those that do only have about 10 years to make their life’s income. Besides if Abramovich and his like choose to throw money around in this way, is that not a great means of wealth distribution?

I went to my first one in 1973.  It was in Brighton – in the Dome next to the Pavilion, since the seafront conference centre had not yet been built.  In those days it wasn’t even called a conference – it was an Assembly.  There was no stage set as such – just a long table up on the platform covered in green baize with municipal flowers in front.  No exhibition area, hardly anything of a fringe.

Apart from my time in the USA (when I attended a Democratic convention), I have attended party conferences most years since, including the one where David Steel famously instructed us to go back to our constituencies and prepare for government.  For an appalling period when I was doing the public affairs job at BT, I used to go to at least four conferences on the trot including the TUC – and if I was really masochistic and went to the SNP bash as well, it would be five.

Four weeks of windowless spaces lit by neon light, four weeks of hotels with noisy lifts and air conditioning, four weeks of undrinkable red wine, greasy canapes and curling sandwiches served up at innumerable fringe meetings.  Conservatives always came last and by that time my face was locked into a rictus of a smile – a kind of painful rigor politeness.

As a consequence I have acquired a deep unease at large masses of political activists being herded together and voting en bloc before spending all night in deafening hotel bars.

So I cannot pretend that I really enjoyed this year’s conference either.  But I did come away with a great deal of respect for Nick Clegg and his ministers.  There is an increasingly impressive list of real liberal achievements in government, all the more remarkable given the horrible wider economic and public spending context.  Nick Clegg’s speech was appropriately sombre and had a welcome lack of punch and judy knockabout which so often demeans these close of conference leader speeches.

Here is one short extract of stuff being delivered because LibDems are in government:

New social housing. Criminal justice reform. Fixed term parliaments. Keeping our Post Offices open. House of Lords reform. Better mental health care. Safer banks. Income tax down for ordinary workers. Capital gains tax up for the rich. Compulsory retirement scrapped. Pensions protected by a triple lock. ID cards: history. Child detention: ended.

Just a fraction of a huge list of Liberal Democrat ambitions already realised in sixteen months of government.  Nick had of course to be honest about some of the disappointments too, particularly student loans.  But in the sixty previous years of opposition, great policies withered on the vine unless they were stolen by the other two parties.

PS Someone said that the last Labour government built more prison cells than homes – if true it is an eye-watering statistic.

He had been in Luton in the afternoon wearing his Deputy Prime Minister hat to deliver a thoughtful and widely reported speech on multiculturalism.

Then he popped down the motorway to our own event at the Jubilee Centre in Catherine Street.  About a hundred people of all ages were present and the format was quite simple – they asked questions, he answered.  Although I was in the chair, he picked out the questioners himself from all round the packed room so everyone had a chance to make their point and no-one was excluded.

Topics included David Cameron’s visit to the Middle East and whether he should have travelled with businessmen involved in the arms trade;  university tuition fees changes (this from a Middlesex University student); whether free schools are divisive (from a local teacher); what the coalition government is doing for young people (from a Verulam pupil);  what the government is doing to control and reduce carbon emissions (from a STAGS pupil);  NHS reform – was it proceeding too quickly?;  the high cost of commuting to London; and what more can be done to provide affordable housing.

Sadly we only had one hour which simply flew by.  But everyone was hugely impressed with Nick’s candour and honesty, his grip on detailed policy, and his frankness in saying so when he did not have knowledge on some specific issues.

And as he left, a phone call from his wife Miriam (with whom I used to work more years ago than either of us care to remember) wondering what time he would be home.  He still had another meeting to go to after ours, and it would not be before 10 pm.  A little reminder that politicians are human and have families.

The importance of Chris Huhne to the success of the Liberal Democrats cannot be over-exaggerated.  In many coalition governments, the junior partner takes over a particular department of state and so can point to a specifically party agenda and tick box of successes.  So in Germany, the second party traditionally takes over Foreign Affairs.

Nick Clegg and the UK Liberal Democrat leadership deliberately did not go down that route.  But there are riskes.  By “embedding” ministers across almost all of government, the Liberal Democrat specific contribution to the successes of the coalition become more blurred.

So departments headed by Liberal Democrats become much more interesting.  But Nick Clegg does not have his own department.  Danny Alexander is Number Two to George Osborne.  Vince Cable’s ability to carve out a distinctive agenda at Business, Innovation and Skills is somewhat circumscribed by Treasury demands and not helped by having to explain the increase in tuition fees.  Michael Moore at Scotland does not have a significant spending brief in a post-devolution constitution.

So step forward Mr Huhne.  Personally I can live with a new generation of civil nuclear power stations if they are genuinely without public subsidy.  And the rest of the programme is powerfully on message and lives up to the claim that the Coalition’s Programme for Government is the greenest of any incoming UK administration.

Not an easy ask since every day has thrown up a new surprise, and doubtless there will be more today with the first round of spending cuts.

But here is what I wrote:

Most constituencies had their own local hustings apeing the television spectaculars.  Our last was with local sixth formers.  It was the Friday before polling day and still glad confident morning for Liberal Democrats.

But every day, every week, every year that Deputy Prime Minister Clegg is beamed into the nation’s living rooms alongside Prime Minister Cameron, the more it will mean good riddance to old politics.

Under Labour, the tax system is complex, unwieldy and, most of all, unfair. This has to change. The Liberal Democrats will rebalance our tax system to make it fair once and for all.

Under the Liberal Democrats the income tax threshold will be raised to £10,000, meaning most taxpayers will see their income tax bills cut by £700.

Nick and Vince set out where every last pound of the money will come from: clamping down on tax avoidance, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, a ‘mansion tax’ on homes worth more than £2 million and making sure that airlines pay for the pollution they cause. You can learn more in the video recorded by Nick.

It’s the biggest tax switch in generations. A radical overhaul to make sure those at the top pay their fair share in order to put money back in the pockets of people who need it.

First, Tory A-lister and high profile parliamentary candidate Zac Goldsmith was revealed to have used non-domicile status to protect some of his considerable wealth.  Clearly one law for the rich, one for the rest of us.  About the only firm Tory tax pledge is to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £2 million precisely to protect people like Mr Goldsmith.  It’s bad enough having all the MPs who have abused the expenses system.  But how can politicians dream of proposing spending cuts, tightening belts and raising charges – all inevitable after the next election whoever wins – if they are using tax avoidance loopholes in a way unimaginable to ordinary constituents?

Second, the Fabian Society briefed yesterday’s newspapers on its soon to be published and painfully honest study of rising inequality in Britain and how Labour’s strategy for tackling poverty had reached the end of the road.

Third, Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats announced costed plans to cut taxes for millions of people by closing tax loopholes and removing tax breaks which disproportionately benefit the wealthiest in our society, by taxing polluting activities, and by introducing a “progressive property levy” (aka the “mansion tax”) on the the value above £2 million of any home.

Fairness is a fundamental tenet of Liberalism.  As Nick Clegg has said, “If you want to know how committed a government is to fairness then look at its tax system.”  I speak at schools in St Albans of my concern that we live in a country where the bottom ten percent of UK income earners pay more tax as a percentage of income than the top ten percent.  What does that say about us as a society and our values?

Under Nick Clegg and Vince Cable’s plan nobody rich or poor will pay a penny on the first £10,000 of annual income.  It’s the same deal for everyone which seems fair.  It will put £700 back in the pockets of the vast majority of taxpayers, and take millions of people on low pay including those on minimum wage out of paying income tax altogether.

The plans represent the most radical, far-reaching tax reform in a generation and embody everything the Liberal Democrats stand for: fairness, protecting the environment, rewarding hard work.

It is not about raising the overall tax burden, it’s just asking those with the broadest shoulders to bear a fairer share.

The so-called mansion tax has attracted the most attention.  Actually the number of homes worth more than £2 million in St Albans constituency is minimal – and the one percent levy is only on the value of properties above the £2 million threshold.  But the people who live in the huge houses worth more than £2 million are the ones with accountants most adept at tax avoidance.  The advantage of taxing bricks and mortar in this way is that it cannot be dodged.

For the full story on the Liberal Democrat tax plans, click here.

We were slightly worried that the Thursday before Bank Holiday would not be the ideal time to attract a crowd to a political meeting. We should not have been concerned. Three hundred people packed into the Marlborough Road Methodist Church to hear Nick take questions from all comers.

He uses no intermediary to pick the questioners. My role was simply to introduce the meeting and then close it, and in the interim try to look graceful. Nick chooses the questioners in batches of three and of course he does not know who anyone is – so he really is putting himself on the line.

He has done nearly 50 meetings like this round the country, and told me this was one of the best ever. The audience was nicely mixed and the questions came fast and furious from a forest of hands – MP expenses, getting young people interested in politics, the future of the health service, drugs, Trident, parliamentary reform, restoring power to local government, Afghanistan, Europe, the euro, what makes a good MP, and many more.

People were hugely impressed with his relaxed approach and his willingness to give straight answers. Nick was hugely impressed with St Albans (no surprise there) and by the quality and depth of the questions. I am sure he will be back soon.

PS My thanks to Gary Shore for the excellent photographs – he is a St Albans based professional photographer and can be contacted at gaslights@googlemail.com

Given his current superstar status and his universally admired success as High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is worth recalling how much he was sneered at and patronised by his opponents and the media when he first became LibDem leader.

Nick Clegg is being similarly under-estimated today. They were wrong about Paddy then and they are wrong about Nick today.

Of course Paddy and I were fellow candidates in Conservative seats back in 1983 and have remained friends ever since. He has come to St Albans on several occasions and is very impressed by the LibDem progress over recent years. He sees the similarities with his first stunning victory in Yeovil and has promised to come to help whenever the general election comes.