"We are the only party willing to come into office committed to controlling our own power." These were the words of Alan Beith, now our Deputy Leader, speaking at the Party Conference of 1991. They are the very heart of what Liberalism is all about. They would be recognised, not just by British Liberals, not just by twentieth-century Liberals, but by Liberals in all countries and in all times as what Oliver Cromwell used to call 'the root of the matter'.

One of the reasons why it is so hard for parties to understand each other is that they have their philosophies about different things. Traditional Conservatism was largely about property. Traditional Socialism was largely about class. Liberalism is and remains largely about power.

Chapter 2 - Controlling Power, from "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism", Conrad Russell, 1999

Looking back on Conrad's words after a further eight years' Labour government and at the personalities that have bubbled to the surface of the modern Conservative party in an attempt to counter Labour's hegemony, I think we would want to change his characterization of those two parties. They have both become about power too.

Not just one Ming, but a whole team of them!

But Conrad means that Liberals are about the careful control of executive power, ensuring that it never oversteps the mark into authoritarianism, that as much as possible it respects the negative liberty of individuals to do as they please in their lives short of harming others. Both the Conservative and Labour parties are now largely obsessed with how to attain power, consolidate it, hold onto it, and wield it. The leaderships of both parties have become presidential and autocratic. Policy formation appears to pay only lip service to ordinary members and has to be vetted, then vetoed or announced personally by the leadership as part of their great guiding "vision".

Nothing makes me more nauseous, frankly, about contemporary British politics than this cult of the "dear leader" - and I'm afraid that the sight of all the blue stockings clapping and singing along to Jimmy Cliff last week was a supreme example! Nothing makes me more worried about the future of our basic freedoms to live as we choose as far as possible than the sight of these great visionaries with a plan for the country, and by extension its people, us, and their adoring crowds of followers. The Nuremberg Rally meets Top of the Pops!

It would be fair to say, of course, that we have always had big personalities in Number 10. But just as growing wealth, technology, travel and so on have given people more freedoms and more choices, it is easy to forget just how difficult communication was only a generation ago compared with today. Mobile phones were barely around during Mrs Thatcher's rule, the internet merely a military-academic project, indeed computers themselves a millionth fraction of what they are today. Yet the more connected we are, the greater our choices of with whom we might associate, learn and collaborate, the more our political leaders are there, in our face, every day, announcing what they think is good for us. And somehow we are all the more apathetic, all the more dependent on them for it. This cannot be progress.

And so I for one do not want a Liberal leadership to be a facsimile of these statist behemoths. Sure, we need an individual whom people can identify as the person most likely to be taking the taxi to the palace in the event of a Lib Dem election victory, but he or she should be no more than a primus inter pares, chairman of the cabinet rather than president for life (even if that life has been short in Tory circles lately), and should be the embodiment of what we would want a Liberal leader to be, which to my mind is quite the opposite of the sort of Labour and Tory leaders we have seen in the last decade. And we have to sell that idea, not try to make our leader pretend to be otherwise just to compete with what we don't want him or her to be!

We should have a publicly visible leadership team. And I don't just mean Ming and his chosen team, such as Ed Davey and Chris Rennard or whoever. But I mean a team put in place by and accountable to different constituencies in the party. One from the parliamentary group, one from our councillors or our LGA group to reflect that we are about localism and devolution, one from each of our devolved assembly groups (though not necessarily the relevant assembly group leader), and one or more put there directly by the membership, or by different groups from the membership even - one GLD, one LDYS, one WLD, one EMLD and so on and one, preferably no more than that, from the party administration. And we should strive to give them all pretty well equal public exposure on the notion that they will be the core of a Lib Dem executive in government dedicated to dispersing power and not centralizing it.

If this sounds an awful lot like the existing Federal Executive, you'd be wrong. The latter would retain responsibility for running the party machinery which would in turn still be responsible for the management of policy formulation and so on. What I am talking about is a group of spokespeople, not necessarily in or from parliament, who represent the core areas of our "narrative" and who would be expected to take on significant jobs in that first Liberal government. This would be more like the Swiss Federal Executive, with everyone having their own brief, and with one of their number elected as chair and prospective head of the government periodically.

Gordon Brown has no real idea what a "government of all the talents" is whilst he himself remains, Shelob like, controlling everything from the centre. Let's show him what it could look like, from a Liberal perspective.