Actually, Owen wanted actual policies and to go beyond the party for a better yesterday, but found himself blocked by the Liberals, who were known for saying one thing in one area and the opposite in another and did not want to alienate a segment of support and Roy Jenkins who wanted to be Prime Minister and uniting with the Liberals. David Owen does like to go on about it in his autobiography.
Yeah, I know. Constantly

I can understand his frustration with the Liberals though, who would basically agree to Owen's pro-nuclear position in an attempt to pick up people who found Foot's disarmament position overly naive, and then would
immediately turn around and say they were anti-nuclear in a press conference.
Although there are a lot of people attracted to the Alliance as a romantic cause (even me to some extent, despite disagreeing with a lot of their actual policies) I do think that even if they had miraculously won a majority the resulting government would have soon collapsed due to this lack of coherency, as well as the large number of untested MPs mentioned above. Canada's NDP is a good analogy here: they have arguably put themselves in a better position by usurping the Canadian Liberals as the official opposition to the Conservatives in one election and then being able to plausibly form the government next time, than they would have if they'd actually won a majority in 2011 and then tried to govern with all those untested freshman MPs, many of whom never dreamed they would actually be elected and were just running in thought-to-be safe Liberal or Bloc seats as practice for the future.