One of the highlights for me of Conference week was being able to get to some more fringe meetings - when I first started going to conference I used to really enjoy them but in recent years it’s been difficult to find time to get to many.

And the one I enjoyed most last week was the Lib Dem History Group’s Who is the Greatest Liberal? Meeting, held on Wednesday evening. It really was an excellent meeting with some superb speakers, and very high-level content.

Tom McNally kicked off by putting the case for John Maynard Keynes to take the title. I learned more about Keynes, and particularly about his involvements with the Liberal party, but I’m afraid I wasn’t quite convinced about his claim to the title (and I ended up putting him fourth).

Next came Paddy making the case for Gladstone. Paddy had all the wit, charisma, and audience support of a former leader, and I would have guessed that from the start Gladstone would have been the favourite for the title. Paddy had some good gags too - saying that he had heard that a female member of the audience had insisted that he Paddy should be on the list himself, and that if she made herself known to him, he would personally ensure that she received a peerage. But he then corrected himself to say that in fact it had been Lloyd George that had taken that approach! And when the PA system didn’t work he was able to point that of course Gladstone famously had no need for electronic amplification when speaking.

Third came Richard Reeves making the case for John Stuart Mill, of whom he has just completed a biography. This was, for me and I suspect many others, much the most revealing contribution of the evening. I had really had no idea that Mill had been so active as a practical politician, for example personally promoting women’s suffrage long before it hit the mainstream political agenda, and being arrested for going around London canvassing in favour of birth control. In a perceptive question afterwards Andy Strange drew the distinction between the ‘men of action’ (Gladstone and Lloyd George) and the ‘men of ideas’ (Mill and Keynes) but Reeves claimed very well that Mill straddled that boundary. And Reeves himself spoke outstandingly well, being very funny and also amusingly ‘going negative’ on the other contenders. His was the best speech of the night and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who made a mental note to remember to read his biography of Mill when it appears.

Last came Professor K.O. Morgan promoting Lloyd George (of whom he in turn had written a biography). For me in deciding how to vote, Lloyd George was the pivotal figure: I’d narrowed it down to him and Gladstone as the two who had actually led a Liberal government to implement their ideas. But my concern was whether LG could really be regarded as a liberal. He certainly did a lot to improve the country and the lot of its poorest, but he did also seem to be very fond of the state as a means of doing that. But in the end Lord Morgan won me over by emphasising LG’s commitment and actions to ‘democratic citizenship’ and so I went and voted for him.

Maybe it was the strength of the speech on the night, or maybe there really is more to Mill than I had remembered - but in the end he carried off the prize (I gather by quite a margin). I was both surprised and disappointed!

But the whole competition was a very useful and entertaining process - and I’ve come home determined to fish out ‘On Liberty’ again and work out what I’d been missing from it.