Vince Cable’s foolish behaviour has severely endangered his party’s electoral credibility, and has scuppered Lib Dem attempts to prove it can be professional.
Sooner or later, it’ll get you. Entering the hallowed power-encrusted halls of Whitehall promises one unavoidable truth- that the office will one day get the better of you, that you will inevitably have to get your hands dirty.
And so it has come to pass with Vince Cable, the once widely revered ‘Saint Vince’. During his time as caretaker leader of the Liberal Democrats, Dr Cable enjoyed widely acknowledged success, from skilfully caricaturing Gordon Brown into everything from ‘Stalin to Mr. Bean’ to intelligently predicting the implosion of Northern Rock in 2007.
There is no doubting Cable’s abject rejection of all notions of conservatism. Stripped back, he is a leftist traditionalist and a free trader that holds no time for interventionist policies. However, his traditionalism appears through his political manoeuvrings rather than necessarily through his policies. Cable essentially saw the Lib-Con pact as a business deal over policy, nothing more, nothing less. His true vision of a Liberal Democrat regime is in close alliance with Labour.
Evidently, that was an absolute impossibility in the general election of this year, and so Saint Vince and the Lib Dems were cagouled into jumping into bed with the Tories, only for them to now fight over the duvet. Under this unhappy union, he planned to ride the wave of the coalition into the 2015 election, where the Liberal Democrats could boast wilfully over their significant policy gains.
How the mighty are fallen. The problem originally manifests itself in the irretrievability of the Lib Dem decision in May. By committing to the conservative coalition they ensured that they no longer represented the great mystery of British politics. They are now caught in a constrained compromise. They reject their old-founded leftist notions, but also cannot portray themselves as bastions of the rising middle class. Secondly, they have dirtied their hands with political mud that is virtually impossible to clean. They will never be able to return to the carefree days when they were up and above politics. The tuition fee vote has rendered this privileged position as a feature of their past; they are Whitehall muckers now, and part of the Establishment that they used to ridicule.
Dr. Cable’s recent Freudian slip to Daily Telegraph undercover reporters reveals two vital truths. Firstly, that Cable holds a vehement ambition to win significant electoral victories over the Conservatives in this electoral term and secondly, it unearths his utter disenchantment with the Coalition’s intrinsic policy direction. In the undercover tapes, Cable revealed his predominant opposition to a myriad of Coalition policies on bank bonuses, the Murdoch media hegemony, immigration, changes to the health service and local government.
However, although Dr. Cable can viably vouch to be on the side of virtue on all of these issues, his behaviour has belied his significant intelligence. Ultimately, it is politically impossible for a business secretary to ‘declare war on Mr. Murdoch ‘ without jeopardizing his career irrevocably. His naivety has damaged both his own credibility and that of his party. This has only further loosened the already fragile Liberal grip on the Coalition’s steering wheel. Their embarrassing u-turns over tuition fees and deficit reduction show that they do not hold the sufficient influence within the Coalition to win such victories. The Bullingdon bond between Cameron and Osborne has a clear, distinct vision of where to take ‘Broken Britain’, with or without the help their necessary Liberal tag-alongs.
Therefore, if the Lib-Dems are to avoid becoming embarrassing also-rans at the next election, they must change their stance. They can no longer run as a party for change, a party devoid of governmental faults, a party capable of delivering a fresh start. They must run as an executive party, a party of government. They must add to this image by gathering support from the fact that 2010 shattered the perception of a Liberal vote resembling a wasted vote.
However, if the Coalition fails to achieve a return to the economic uplands in 2011 and continues to alienate certain sectors of society, then any Liberal rejuvenation is impossible. If they are to succeed, then the Coalition must also succeed, for they are now directly associated with both it’s faults and successes. Nick Clegg knows this all too well, whether Dr. Cable and his party have the foresight to recognize it as well remains to be seen.
