When, before he became our greatest living playwright, Sir Tom Stoppard was a young journalist in Bristol, he applied for a job as a political reporter on a London paper.

“You say you’re interested in politics,” said the editor. “Who is the Home Secretary?” Stoppard replied: “Look, I said I was interested – not obsessed.”

As Stoppard’s plays show, of course, he is interested in, and interesting on, political subjects – notably human rights in eastern Europe during the Cold War. But his response acknowledged an important distinction. Most sane people are not obsessively interested in the minutiae of politics, something that James Carville, the strategist for Bill Clinton’s election campaign, realised when he came up with the mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

When there are direct threats to their livelihoods, freedoms or rights, people pay close attention to the political solutions on offer. The rest of the time, however, most of us have better things to do – such as clinging on to our jobs, feeding our families and worrying about whether we can afford to get the car fixed – than trying to remember the name of the Home Secretary (it’s Theresa May.)

There are tragic folk who delight in the most trivia arcana of political life. The truly desperate saddos amongst this bunch might even be able to tell you who was Home Secretary 21 years ago. I’m sorry to say that I can tell you that it was David Waddington without having to look it up. I remind myself, though, that I am not as far gone as the real lunatics, a good many of whom, unsurprisingly enough, become politicians themselves.

But even within this self-selecting and self-regarding crowd of maniacs, there is a special breed of political anoraks, endlessly obsessed by issues to which no normal person would give more than a couple of moments’ thought. I allude, of course, to party activists from the Liberal Democrats.

That is not to deny the many grand and admirable principles which lie behind liberalism and for that matter – despite what many politicians clearly feel – democracy. Indeed, at the last election, the Liberal Democrats proposed the single most sensible policy placed before the electorate, which was to lift more people out of the tax system altogether. They also staked their credibility on their opposition to a rise in university tuition fees; a more expensive promise, but at least one that might be thought principled and worthwhile.

So, working out the price of their involvement in a coalition, the Liberal Democrats would, you’d assume, have given priority to these measures likely to affect, even transform, the lives of lots of voters and, one imagines, to be very popular in the real world.

Well, I assume you’d assume that because I also assume that you’re a normal, well-balanced person, with a reasonable set of priorities and expectations. They, by contrast, are a set of swivel-eyed policy wonks with an idée fixe about tinkering with the voting system and monkeying with the constitution. Naturally, therefore, they dropped their pledge on tuition fees and scaled back their desire to let you keep more of your wages in favour of a referendum on the Alternative Vote.

Undeterred by the electorate’s complete indifference and (with the exception of a very few areas, like Islington and Hillhead) uniform opposition to this issue, the LibDem conference turned at the weekend to their other obsession: reform of the House of Lords.

Anyone might, of course, consider altering the voting system or the make-up of the second chamber, but there are obvious reasons why very few people put it high on their list of priorities. One is that there are an awful lot of more important things which need doing (“the economy, stupid”). Another is that the voting system and the Lords, however complicated, artificial or odd their evolution has been or their current construction may seem, work tolerably well.

The overwhelming reason, though, is that any reform ought to be able to demonstrate that it will be an improvement. The demand from LibDem delegates that every member of the second chamber be elected – going even further than the party’s leadership suggested – may look unobjectionable, but there are huge difficulties which have not been resolved.

There has been no real alteration to the composition of the Upper House, bar the Parliament Act of 1911, the Salisbury Convention, and Tony Blair’s removal of the majority of hereditary peers, despite calls for reform for most of the past century, because these issues are fiendishly complicated.

If there were to be an elected senate, what would distinguish the legitimacy of these politicians from those in the House of Commons? That would be a particularly acute issue if they were to be elected (as one imagines they would be) differently, by constituency and probably by voting system as well. What would be the logic of retaining the second house’s role as a purely revising chamber?

The former Tory cabinet minister Lord Wakeham was airily confident that all these matters could be sorted out when I saw him shortly after Mr Blair had put him in charge of a Royal Commission looking into the next stage of reform. That was more than a decade ago, and despite several further reports and public consultations, there is no sign of the questions being resolved.

Indeed, the House of Lords seems to take the view that, since the removal of most of the hereditary peers and with the political balance more even after the creation of numerous Labour peers, it has more legitimacy and right to clash with the Commons.

This problem was demonstrated when, four years ago, the Commons voted overwhelmingly for an all-elected House of Lords and the Lords voted the following week, by an even bigger majority, for an all-appointed chamber.

This may eventually be solvable, but while the Upper House functions well as it is, only a few political obsessives want to rush change in.

The rest of us have other things to worry about, and the Liberal Democrats, given their currently political standing, might be better off if they had, too.