Vince Cable – an aura of quiet authority.

An article from The Independent 16 December 2008

The full article can be read at the following link.

Vince Cable Independent Article

 

 

What people don’t realise,” says Vince Cable, “is how varied an MP’s life is.” That’s an unusual choice of adjective. Notice that he is not complaining that the life of an MP is hard, underpaid, subject to constant press intrusion and so on. Here is a man past normal retirement age quietly satisfied that he has a vast amount of work to do – such as meeting a gangster who is worried because some other criminal wants him dead.

After a brief chat in Cable’s home in Twickenham in west London, we drive off to see his assistant, Sandra Fayle, who helps with constituency work. They discuss visitors to the previous Friday’s evening surgery, a regular slot in Cable’s diary, which gives a cross-section of Twickenham’s population, including the good, the mad and the bad, the chance to bring their problems to their local MP.

Cable has at his side, on Fayle’s dining-room table, a pile of buff folders, each marked with the name of a constituent and containing notes about that person’s particular concerns.

“Ah, this is a weird one,” he says, opening another folder, a half smile playing across his round, wrinkled face, as if he finds the story quizzical but not actually funny. “This guy’s a gangster, a serious gangster. He had a wonderful tale. He talked about his driver, who had killed five people. He had to let him go, because he was too violent. The particular problem he has is that somebody has taken a contract out on his life.”

What? In 2008? In Twickenham?

“The police are taking this quite seriously,” Cable says. “They have advised him to take precautions. What he wants to find out is who it is who’s got this contract out on his life.”

On television, Vince Cable comes over as a voice of quiet authority born of experience. He is to political spin what John Sergeant is to ballroom dancing. He is not young. To be cruelly blunt, he is not handsome either, with that face like a collapsed pudding. Most of his hair parted company with his skull years ago, and such wisps as cling on around the back of the head are iron-grey. He lacks a photogenic young family to put before the cameras for a self-aggrandising Christmas card, and he does not know how to rattle off political nostrums with that slick confidence that the leading politicians learnt in their university debating societies.

Despite his addiction to work, Cable finds time for one serious hobby. For years, he has been going twice a week to a dancing school in Hampton Wick for lessons in ballroom and Latin dancing. His late wife used to be his dancing partner. Rachel Cable, his second wife, has taken her place. When he is asked to assess for himself how good he is, Cable claims to be “better than John Sergeant, but not as good as the stars of the ballroom”. But you don’t have to take his word for it; on YouTube, you can find a clip of him twirling around the dance floor with last year’s Strictly Come Dancing winner, Alesha Dixon. “He clearly knows his steps. He enjoys what he does. He looks like he’s not afraid of a bit of hard work,” Dixon reckons.

Even before Sergeant’s notorious appearance on this year’s show, Cable had confided to the BBC that he would like to compete. It has been suggested that he might have won, but the hoped-for invitation never came. Giving a practising politician that kind of exposure on prime-time television could have landed the BBC with problems it did not need. “I think it would be too controversial,” Cable concedes. “From their point of view, they see all the dangers, because they would have other parties demanding the right to go on, and people would start using the programme for political ends.”

Well, maybe there should be an election special Strictly Come Dancing, with Cable dancing for the Liberal Democrats, Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy representing Labour, and for the Conservatives, perhaps, Ann Widdecombe.

Nonetheless, Cable has carved out a television role with rather more gravitas. Note how, after the commentators have asked Alistair Darling to defend the Government’s handling of the recession, and George Osborne to trash the same, they turn to Vince Cable as the person who can quietly, reliably, intelligibly and intelligently explain what the hell is going on. In an age when public regard for politicians is at rock bottom, the Lib Dems’ shadow Chancellor has a rare quality – people trust him.

It must have been this aura of quiet authority that made the local gangster think he could go to Vince Cable for vital information about the feuds and hatreds in the underworld. Cable and Fayle agree that a letter to the local CID head is in order. The letter will enquire about this underworld contract (without necessarily expecting the police to tell them about it), and will stress that, as the local MP, Cable would not want to see any of his constituents rubbed out by a hit man.

Other stories from the pile of buff folders are more prosaic, but still important to those concerned. One is from a retired police officer whose record is so clean that he has never had so much as a parking ticket in his life, but he has copped an automatic fine after a camera spotted him in a bus lane. He has a plausible reason for being there, but you cannot explain that to a camera.

Then there’s the elderly couple living by a golf club who understandably object to the frequency which their windows are broken by stray golf balls; and a woman on income support whose sister borrowed her car and ran up £1,300 in fines; plus two youths who are joining the Peace Brigades volunteers in Guatemala and want an emergency number they can call if should they find themselves in danger – and so on.

Every week, Cable, 65, handles between 15 and 20 such cases face to face, as well as trying to keep up with a huge volume of correspondence. One day, when the economic news was particularly dire, 750 emails dropped into his in-box.

***

Vince Cable lives simply in Twickenham in a house he bought 35 years ago for £12,000. On working days, he walks to the railway station to take the commuter train to Westminster. His house is obviously now worth a large multiple of what he paid for it, but it is not one of those million-pound-plus properties that abounded in west London during the property boom. Its value is diminished by recession, and by being within shouting distance of Twickenham rugby stadium. On match days, 80,000 people pass in front of his gate, and he can find himself caught inside a police cordon.

As I arrive at his home, just before 9am, he and Rachel are still at breakfast. His day has started late because GMTV cancelled a studio interview at short notice. Not far behind me are two of his constituents, one of them a freelance journalist who wants to interview him for the financial press.

When they are gone and he has completed his constituency business, we head for Westminster, where he is meeting the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, and David Laws, the party’s education spokesman, to go over an early draft of a policy document.

Next, he has meetings with two constituents, and then it’s into the Commons chamber for the debate over the police raid on the offices of the Conservative MP Damian Green, after which it’s back to Clegg’s office for another meeting, then a dash up to his third-floor office, where a party officer named Issan Ghazni is waiting to see him.

Issan, like Cable, is a defector from the Labour Party (but of more recent vintage) and an illustration of how times have changed. Cable left in 1982 because Labour was veering to the left and obsessed with world affairs at the expense of everyday problems. Issan left in 2003, for the opposite reasons: “Iraq was the last straw,” he says.

Today, Issan has two little lists – seats where they hope to get a Liberal Democrat from an ethnic background into Parliament next time round, and seats where he is aiming for what he calls a “two-election victory”. He would like Walthamstow in east London, Birmingham Hodge Hill, and Leicester South to be on the first list, with Luton South and Birmingham Perry Barr on the second. This entails a decision about where the Liberal Democrats concentrate their thin resources at the next election. The party is short of millionaire backers, and has experienced some well-publicised problems with the few they have, but there is a Rowntree Trust grant to the party to be used to improve its ethnic and gender balance. Cable listens without committing himself.

Next, there are telephone messages to be answered, from more people with demands on Cable’s time. His new status as the Liberal Democrats’ biggest asset takes him out of London more often than he would like. He has seen 10 towns or cities in the previous five days, including a large fundraising dinner in Newcastle upon Tyne. Between now and Christmas, he must sign 500 Christmas cards to party members and other helpers. After Christmas, he is hoping to complete a book on the economic crisis. Understandably, then, at least one caller got a polite but definite “no”.

Cable’s parliamentary office is on the third floor of Portcullis House, the building that resembles a giant radiator on the corner where the Victoria Embankment meets Westminster Bridge. He has two adjoining rooms. The outer office is cramped, because it is really only big enough for one or possibly two assistants, but Cable has three, all young. The shelves are crammed with boxes of papers. Hanging on the wall, where another MP might choose to have a tasteful work of art or a boastful framed photograph of himself, Cable for some reason has a map of the British railway system. His office is bigger, with a sizeable desk at the window, while nearly half the room is given over to a table where up to six people can comfortably hold a conference.

The outer office fills with four guests, all experts in the law as it affects the education of children with learning disabilities. Cable has arranged for them to meet the Secretary of State, Ed Balls, at 7.15pm, which leaves them just 20 minutes to decide what they want to say to the minister.

Anyone who has ever brought together four experts with strong opinions on an emotive subject will know that bringing their conversation to a conclusion in 20 minutes is a challenge. It puts Cable in the unusual position, for a professional politician, of being the one person at the meeting who will not offer an opinion. He looks at his watch a couple of times, and gently reminds the gathering that they must concentrate on just two or three main points they want to make when they are in the Secretary of State’s office. “We won’t have long in there, and Ed Balls is a loquacious fellow,” he warns.

It is a tribute to his chairmanship that by the 19th minute, they have agreed what they want to say, and who will do the talking.

When the meeting with Balls is over, there is one more item on Cable’s diary for the day – a working dinner scheduled for 8.30pm with Danny Alexander, who is in charge of drawing up the party’s next election manifesto.