What is the point of the Lib Dems if they can't be bothered turning up to vote against Brexit?

The Liberal Democrats could have brought the Conservatives to within one vote of defeat on a huge Brexit bill, but Tim Farron and Sir Vince Cable weren't there

Tim Farron has apologised after failing to turn up to a vote on the Brexit trade bill (PA)

During the 2017 general election campaign, it was occasionally whispered in Liberal Democrat circles that Tim Farron would struggle to bring down the government’s Brexit’s plans if he didn’t stop constantly talking about gay sex being a sin.

So it is especially unfortunate then, that a year and month later, Tim Farron has again failed to defeat the government’s Brexit plans because he was too busy to take part in a crucial vote on Monday night, because he was too busy in a church hall in Dorset, talking about gay sex being a sin.

The government passed its Brexit trade bill by three votes on Monday night, which is to say that three extra votes the other way could have stopped it. These are the kind of circumstances in which one expects both the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Vince Cable and his predecessor, Tim Farron, to be present.

But they were not. Both were “otherwise engaged." If you find yourself struggling to remember, decades from now, why it was that Brexit happened, one reason to try and remember might just be that even the Liberal Democrats couldn't quite get round to voting against it.

So many and various are the high banter watermarks of Brexit, all one can be certain of is that something even more ridiculous will arrive soon enough.

But for Tim Farron to miss a huge chance to inflict a huge defeat on the government, because he is in a church hall in Dorset discussing the disastrous impact of his faith-based views on homosexuality on his party’s own election campaign, is certainly it for now.

The Lib Dem chief whip, Alastair Carmichael has issued a statement on the matter, which begins with the words, “I messed up” and then needlessly carries on for about three hundred more.

Poor guy. Life was so much easier for him when all the Lib Dem MPs fitted in just the one minivan, and he could drive them through the voting lobbies himself. Now we’re up in to the giddy heights of double figures, it evidently must be that much harder to stop Tim Farron from gleefully accepting absolutely any opportunity he can to scuttle off to a church hall somewhere and talk about gay sex being a sin.

Carmichael does explain that he wasn’t “expecting the vote to be close”, because Labour had planned on abstaining, meaning the vote would pass by hundreds. And by the time they’d changed their minds it was “too late”.

All of which serves as a very clear window in to why the country has spent most of the last hundred years being governed by a party it really doesn’t like. For all the Tories’ luminous crapness, and it has never been more spectacularly shambolic than now, the other side can traditionally be counted upon to be that much worse.