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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

It's been a while since Paper Monitor has been able to indulge itself in the art of the parliamentary sketch writer, what with it being summer and all that. But now, with the LibDems in full flow in Brighton, all the pent-up energy usually spent on crafting and turning phrases to crushing effect is now unleashed.

You know the sort of thing - the kind of line which made the world realise the genius of Clive James (of this parish): Arnold Schwarzenegger being like a "brown condom full of walnuts". Creating one or perhaps two of those memorable phrases in an entire career is the point of becoming a sketch writer. Paper Monitor likes to think of the rivals meeting each morning, having each other's efforts and keeping a tally of palpable hits.

So will today's efforts bother the scorers? Probably not.

Simon Carr, in the Independent, mentions that sign language in Welsh "looks like trying to plait fingers, with interludes of trying to throttle an angry swan. It's what they have instead of ballet." He also says that Lib Dem philosophy "bulges and sags like a shoplifter's tights".

Andrew Gimson in the Daily Telegraph pastiches the party's love of policy detail thus: "We are told that once you get absorbed in the details, the relative merits of site value rating and local income tax becomes so enthralling that they require no adornment, but we still deprecate the school of Lib Dem oratory that absolute earnestness is all that a speaker needs."

Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail describes Brian Sedgemore, a former Labour MP who is now a Lib Dem activist. "He has taken naturally to his new party's codes of hygiene and sartorial tidiness. Invited to speak in the economy debate, Mr Sedgemore loped up to the stage with a vulpine grin, his clothes loose-fitting, his demeanour somehow managing to be both bald and shaggy. Mr Sedgemore is an exponent of the too-short sock which slumps to the ankle, betraying shiny shin and just a hint of varicose vein."

And Ann Treneman in the Times adds he is "a huge man, ungainly and awkward, a maverick whose rhetoric can be as wild as a rodeo".

Playing the ball and not the man is not, it seems, the done thing in this game.

Talking of which, the Guardian has now got into the whole Graeme le Saux debate. You'll remember that last week his autobiography, serialised in the Times of all papers, talked about how he had been abused simply because he read the Guardian. Well today at last the Guardian does the decent thing by the lad, giving him a leader column of his own: "". It had to happen eventually.

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