The day Joey Essex hijacked the Liberal Democrats' campaign tour

Only the Liberal Democrats would allow their key mental health press conference to be hijacked by the reality star Joey Essex. It’s hard to think of a more elegant way to say “we care”, short of sticking Nick Clegg in front of party branding reading: “You don’t have to be mad to work here – but it helps!”

Arguably even more encouraging was the backstage buzz about the Only Way is Essex player among Lib Dem staffers, several of whom appeared to be mainlining stardust. “I think Nick enjoyed speaking to Joey,” one confided to another.

“Really nice to meet you this morning,” the deputy prime minister tweeted Joey, whose wildly successful personal marketing strategy has been to present himself as the stupidest man in Britain. “Sorry about the early start! Hope the programme goes well!”

Given that he also tabled a question for David Cameron via Heat magazine, you could be forgiven for thinking that Joey is fast emerging as the Zelig of this general election campaign. In fact, the arrangement is more formalised than that. Over the next few weeks, he is to film interviews with the four main party leaders for the neuron-killing channel ITV2, as part of a programme entitled Educating Joey Essex.

If you choose to see Joey as a walking indictment of successive governments’ education policies, that is a matter for you. All I can tell you is that he freely admits to not being able to tell the time, and I once saw him asking what a bank holiday was. “A day off?” he replied in bemusement, after the concept had been explained. “But we don’t work anyway!”

Liberal Democrats was the notion giving him trouble on Tuesday. “It’s a long word,” he informed Clegg. “It’s got cats in it.” (The party later added a Liberal Democats feline logo to its website, because all publicity is good publicity.)

With that, we took our leave of Joey, and it was off on the Lib Dem bus to Cardiff, by way of Watford. The battle bus – the embattled bus, if you will – is a deeply yellow affair, bearing the words: “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society. Opportunity for Everyone.” As cavalier bus slogans go, it’s not exactly up there with the Japan side’s 2014 World Cup effort: “Samurai, the time has come to fight!”

Still, in the wacky races of democracy, it’s doing better than Labour’s scaled down battlebus. On day one of the campaign, that vehicle broke down before it got out of the car park and required AA assistance to get it going, offering a strong hint that Labour’s forthcoming manifesto will contain a pledge to provide its own metaphors.

First stop on the Lib Dem bus was Watford for a hi-vis-jacket setpiece in what was billed as a health campus but turned out to be a vast, near-empty building site, which is going to be transformed under the auspices of the local Lib Dem mayor, Dorothy Thornhill. A party operative explained: “In this area, which has the capacity to hold 30 baseball pitches, is Dorothy’s field of dreams.”

Yup, it’s like Shoeless Joe Jackson says to Costner: if you build it, they will totally forget about that tuition fees thing. Indeed, it was baseball metaphors all the way, as Nick explained: “I am SO PROUD that my plucky little party stepped up to the plate in 2010.”

We then reboarded for the long drive to Cardiff. In terms of being thrown together with politicking strangers, the bus is a bit like Channel 4’s teatime stalwart Coach Trip, except you can’t vote people off (at least, not till 7 May).

I’ll level with you: it wasn’t up there with my favourite tour bus scenes. Which was a shame, considering that – as the official vehicle of the coalition’s junior partners – it definitely had potential. Some bad stuff has happened. Some 

Clearly the best thing would have been for everyone on the bus to join in with a cathartic singalong of Tiny Dancer, like in the movie Almost Famous, and suddenly remember why they were in this band in the first place. But it didn’t happen.

As far as a ticket to ride goes, this baby is expensive. I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you how much a single day’s seat on the bus costs, but I can confirm it doesn’t come with a free cheque for £749. Either way, you don’t get as much bang for your buck as you did back in 1983 under the joint SDP-Liberal alliance leadership of David Owen and David Steel, when there was an election bus for each David.

A veteran of that campaign once told me that journalists basically spent the entire five weeks or so trying to get one of the Davids to unwittingly contradict the other, which they apparently did hourly.

That was seven years before Joey Essex was born, of course, and only a cynic could fail to appreciate the progress politics and those who cover it have made since then. Or, as ITV2’s political correspondent explained in the wake of his Clegg selfie: “I only found out who the prime minister was about a week ago.”