AS THE Liberal Democrats gathered in York at the weekend, the party was said to be trying to put clear blue water between itself and the Conservatives.

Quite how you put clear blue water between yourself and the party you have governed with – or squabbled with while fighting for co-ownership of the tiller – is a tricky question and one that will need an answer in the coming year before the General Election.

York Barbican has seen some comedians down the years, and now Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has joined their number with his closing address in which he did a stand-up riff on his love of Britain, the telephone, the steam engine, the jet engine, stainless steel, queuing, cups of tea, the UK’s culture industry, the BBC, the NHS, the shipping forecast, the weather, the birth of Prince George and Private Eye.

Well, it’s always useful to have some sentimental markers when you don’t have anything much to say.

It’s hard to put your finger on what it is about Mr Clegg that can be annoying. After all, he says he wants his party to be the “guardians of a modern, open and tolerant Britain” – and who wouldn’t want that?

Well, Nigel Farage for one. Mr Clegg touched on the rise of Ukip, warning that the party once dismissed by David Cameron as the fruitcake party, embodied “an ungenerous, backwards looking politics”.

That is certainly true, and Mr Farage’s misty-eyed longing for a distant mono-cultural Britain that never really existed is just a mock-nostalgic face for old-fashioned suspicion and small-mindedness.

Ukip is more disgruntlement made saggy flesh than a real political party; it is a few nasty ideas wrapped in fake barstool bonhomie rather than anything properly coherent. Yet plenty of people seem to be impressed by a party that remains more or less a one-man band, single-issue party without, as yet, a single MP.

So, yes, Mr Clegg was right to criticise the anti-European Ukip. In his Barbican speech he also struck a nice tone, saying that he loved Britain for “all its contradictions. I love that we are as modest as we are proud”.

This is where he dragged Private Eye into list, saying that he loved “ a country where we line the streets waving our Union Jacks wildly to welcome the arrival of Prince George, and the next moment we’re chuckling at Private Eye’s front page: ‘Woman Has Baby’”.

But passable speeches on a bright spring day do not put everything right. For Mr Clegg and his party have been bruised by the job-share politics of the coalition government.

They will no doubt argue for the next 15 months that they have kept the Conservative Party nicer than it would have been, while also helping to correct Labour’s economic blunders.

But it’s a tricky balance. Voters inclined to the left will worry that all the Lib Dems have done is prop up a pretty right-wing government; while those on the right will think that the Lib Dems have got in the way and prevented the Government from being properly right wing.

As for the suggestion that Mr Clegg could lead his party into a coalition with Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, isn’t that just a way for the Lib Dems to remain permanently in government, swapping sides as it suits?

But at least they came to York and enjoyed themselves, which was nice.

• AS a long-time fan of Scandi noir dramas on BBC4, a keen lapper-up of all those dark subtitled delights, I have to say that BBC2’s Line Of Duty is utterly brilliant – and more than a match for any Swedish or Danish drama.

The last series of The Bridge was one of the best crime dramas in years, but Jed Mecurio’s police corruption drama is simply astonishing, and shows that the Brits can still show the world a thing or two. And the usually elegant Keeley Hawes is unrecognisable as the tortured cop at the centre of a deep vortex in which no one seems to be innocent. More, please.