<p>Nick Clegg's wife Miriam succeeded in working touches of LIb Dem yellow into her outfits this week. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images</p><p>The conference season is becoming irrelevant, the political commentators tell us. In the age of the floating voter, no party and particularly not the Lib Dems has a loyal audience of the party faithful tuning in at home. What are you left with? A bunch of people in a room talking to each other. That's a meeting, not a conference.</p><p>This is precisely why what party leaders, would-be leaders, ex-leaders and more importantly, their wives wear during conference season matters more than ever before. In the time it takes viewers to reach for the remote, they will take in your tie, shirt colour and fit of your jacket. Bring a photogenic female into frame and they will gaze long enough to take in the height of her heels and the price of her haircut. Visual messaging is the new policy booklet.</p><p>When a political party has a clear image, it also has an identifiable sartorial look. (Think of Thatcherism, or New Labour.) There was no such unifying look in Brighton this week, a reflection, one assumes, of the splintered identity of the party.</p><p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/sep/26/lib-dem-stylewatch?newsfeed=true">Keep reading...</a></p>