When I exited the polling booth in Tollcross two years ago, happy in the knowledge that I’d nailed my fledgling political colours to the Lib Dems’ mast, the current reality was not what I imagined.

Nick Clegg, in what to him must now seem the good old days, was a British Obama, a “game-changer”, the most exciting politician in a generation. Two years on: the media taunts and vilifies him by turns, his party’s popularity is scraping along at 13%, and 58% of the optimists who checked the box next to the little yellow bird in 2010 would not do so again at the next general election.

Indeed, I have taunted and vilified with the best of them. A generation of students will not forgive the Lib Dems  their disgraceful and hugely damaging climb-down over tuition fees; a generation of people will not forgive them their support for the swiftest, deepest cuts to welfare and social spending in British history. Humiliatingly rejected at the polls over long-cherished voting reform and simultaneously pummeled in local government elections, they watched as Cameron absorbed the credit for Lib Dem ideas such as low-earner tax cuts.

For those of us smarting at the actions of a coalition nobody voted for, it is all too easy to criticize. Very little of the Conservative’s policy has been surprising. As the cuts bite and the economy continues to wallow, it is their junior coalition partners, the liberals, somehow overseeing this conservative agenda, who take the fall.

Telling, however, are the Conservative backbench grumbles of the Lib Dem leash holding them back. As Clegg said in his closing speech at the recent Liberal Democrat party conference, their role is to “anchor the government in the centre ground”. Indeed, it is generally acknowledged that they are a useful liberal counter-weight to baser Tory impulses. It must be acknowledged too that the output of the coalition has been sometimes surprising for a Conservative-dominated government. On issues of abortion, school grants, crime and justice, energy policy, the NHS and Europe, Lib Dem influences are clear.

Problematically for much of their electorate, the Liberal Democrats remain united with their Conservative partners over the planned elimination of the deficit by 2015, and in support for spending cuts as a means to that end. It has to be noted, however, that the crisis narrative dominating media and government throughout Europe and the US is a powerful motive for radical action: the last thing either party wishes to be labeled as is ‘soft’.

The fact remains that the Lib Dems like being in government. Despite the ideological heartache their coalition partners cause, the prevailing conviction within the party that they are a force for good is steady. Public disagreements between Clegg and Cameron have become more frequent; in recent months the riots, the Human Rights Act and the Conservatives’ cherished free schools programme have been flashpoints between Liberal and Tory opinion.

There have been many failings too: the public’s favourite, Vince Cable, has proved remarkably unable to shore up his attacks on profligate spending, executive pay and bonuses in the City. The Lib Dems had nothing to say about the recent military action in Libya, nor very much about Afghanistan.

At their recent conference, Clegg promised delegates that they would “fight for greater fairness, even in the headwinds of an economic slowdown”. He demanded that liberals refuse to apologise for the “difficult things we have to do”, and re-stated his commitment to his principles and to government, referencing recent BBC research which showed 75% of their manifesto has either been implemented or is in the process of being implemented.

For all his bullishness, the major problem of how to better communicate their achievements remains unaddressed. The party president Tim Farron has publicly acknowledged that the coalition “will end in divorce” and his party faces political annihilation at the next general election unless it can become a catalyst for, rather than a obstacle to, change. Their stoicism is commendable, but to quote Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, “for all the rumblings at the Birmingham conference, like Cathars at Montségur, the Lib Dems face death with discipline”.

Originally published 27 September 2011.