Today the Lib Dems had to face up to how their party's changed since ditching their leader.
Charles Kennedy reminded them of what they had before - a leader who was well-known, well-liked and well - not tainted by being just another politician. He ended his speech by declaring that "the best was yet to come" - and you couldn't help feeling he might mean for him and not just for his party.
The debate about Ming Campbell's tax plans confronted the Lib Dems with what they've gained after Kennedy - a leader who believes that seriousness and credibility matter more than personal popularity. His party voted today to boldly go where no party has gone before. That, of course, is for good reason. Voters may say it's time to do something about climate change but no-one knows if the Lib Dems are right that voters are ready to pay for it by paying more to drive and more to fly.
In those "before and after" adverts, people always look glum before and happy after. Today the Lib Dems looked like a party unsure whether it was better off or not.
I wrote the last entry whilst watching the lights go out on the Lib Dems debate about tax (there are power cuts in Brighton). We'll discover soon whether the party turns out the lights on Ming's tax policy.
BRIGHTON: How on earth did it come to this? The party that promised to save the NHS from privatisation and is on course to have trebled its budget finds itself under siege for, you guessed it, privatising the NHS and making cuts.
The answer is clear. Labour came to power without a strategy for running the health service, and the strategy it has now adopted appears to many of its own supporters to contradict much of what it said to get into power. Then it attacked the hated Tory internal market. Now it has re-introduced a version of it (albeit one that ministers insist is fairer and less destructive than the old one). Then it attacked the invitation to private companies to work in the NHS. Now it says that private companies are vital to delivering the values of the NHS. Then it promised to - and later did - build new local hospitals. Now it has accepted the emerging consensus in the medical profession that the NHS needs fewer, bigger, more specialised hospitals.
The reason this happened is because in opposition the party's intellectual firepower was all directed at policies where Labour was seen as politically vulnerable. As one of those involved put it to me at the time, "what do we need a new NHS strategy for? We're 33 per cent ahead of the Tories on health." Another confessed that if you look at the siting of new hospitals, they tended to be in Labour constituencies (incidentally, I'm told, that the last Tory government did exactly the same - favouring its own seats for capital spending).
The result - a strike this week and a possible conference defeat next week in protest at the privatisation of NHS logistics. Meanwhile doctors are talking of running candidates against Labour at the election in protest at hospital closures.
The question now is how the government will react. Tony Blair is more convinced than ever that his reforms are the only way forward. He points to the gap between the performance of the NHS in England with that in Wales, where similar reforms were resisted. Gordon Brown though has long been privately critical of the rhetoric of reform which demoralises staff and leads the public to doubt that the NHS is delivering.
Last week before a speech to the TUC dinner he issued a press release including a quote in which he gave his full backing to the Prime Minister's NHS reforms. In the end it was a statement he never made, choosing instead to declare - to union applause - that the NHS would never be privatised.
The question that has not been convincingly answered is whether Prime Minister Brown would simply change the rhetoric or the policy as well.
