Vince Cable is the Mr Spock of British politics: the logical, super-brainy first officer with the deadpan sense of humour. When the spaceship hits the asteroid belt and the world economy starts to vibrate into tiny radioactive pieces, we earthlings tend to panic. Spock/Cable, with his patient manner and his digitalised slide rule, does not. He is the man to whom we turn for reassurance. Late in life and against all odds he has become a star; and now, as stars must do these days, he has written his memoirs just in time for the Christmas market.

In dry and technical prose we learn that John Vincent Cable was not born on the planet Vulcan but in the city of York, in 1943, to strictly religious parents. His father, a ­college lecturer, who later rose to become president of the National Association of Schoolmasters, was known locally as “Hitler”; his mother, a distant figure, suffered a mental breakdown.

“Something happened in childhood that cauterised my emotions,” writes Cable. “I came to feel almost total indifference towards my parents. When they died, I felt a vague sense of sadness and guilt that there was nothing more: no tears.” Relations were not improved by his first marriage, to Olympia Rebelo, a Kenyan Asian — beautiful, but proud and prickly, according to her doting husband — after which his parents did not speak to him for six years. Olympia died in 2001, a decade and a half after being diagnosed with cancer. Later that same year, Cable met his second wife. “My three children were, in different ways, puzzled and distressed to see their father disappearing so soon into a relationship with a new woman.”

As with most autobiographies by still-active politicians, much has to be carefully hidden between the lines. Cable today is the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats: it must be embarrassing for him to record that for the best part of 20 years the focus of his ambition was the Labour party. The narrative confusingly seesaws back and forth, describing a patchwork of short-term posts – working for the Kenyan government, lecturing in economics at Glasgow, a two-year secondment to the Foreign Office, a spell in Overseas Development, a stint at the Commonwealth Secretariat — the classic, restless curriculum vitae of a would-be MP in search of a seat.

Cable fought one parliamentary constituency, Glasgow Hillhead, as a Labour candidate, and made strenuous efforts to get himself adopted in several others, notably Hampstead, where he was outmanoeuvred by Ken Livingstone. He even served as John Smith’s special adviser in the last year of the Callaghan government, an interlude glossed over in a couple of pages. “It is quite possible,” he concedes, “that had I stayed in Glasgow I would have remained in the Labour party.” The issue that finally drove him out was his decision to send his eldest son to a private school, “a subject that aroused the righteous indignation of party activists like no other (and still does)”.

It took Cable another four attempts to get into parliament. By the time he finally made his maiden speech as a Liberal Democrat, he was 54: the very opposite of a high-flyer. Yet somehow this proved to be a strength. In a House of Commons packed with bright and inexperienced young things, Cable came across as a grown-up. He also — ­reading between the lines again — is a bit nastier than people realise. He narrates the demise of Charles Kennedy with many a weaselly reference to “stories” of his “alleged” heavy drinking, yet omits to mention that Kennedy did not so much fall from the leadership as find himself pushed by Cable, who secretly collected 11 front bench signatures calling for his resignation. In a similar way, the ­circumstances of Sir Menzies Campbell’s equally ruthless defenestration are also skimmed over. Cable, one suddenly realises, is a man who learnt his political skills in the smoky back rooms and backstreets of socialist Glasgow. “I rather enjoyed putting in the knife,” he confesses, describing his highly effective attacks as acting leader on the ­hapless Gordon Brown. “I think that at the core of it was a suppressed rage: the feeling that I could be doing his job, and doing it much better.”

And so Cable approaches his apotheosis, as the Man Who Foresaw the Credit Crunch. This is not, strictly speaking, accurate. The 2008 global financial meltdown was caused by bad American mortgage loans and a consequent loss of confidence among the banks (which Cable never warned against), not inflated British house prices (which he did, in 2003, but that does not seem to have mattered much). Indeed, oddly for such a cerebral man, Cable is obviously a better speaker than he is a writer, and a better performer than he is a strategist: witness the muddle at the recent Lib Dem conference over his plan to impose a super tax on expensive homes, which now seems to have been quietly dropped.

However, there is no denying that Cable res­ponded to the financial ­crisis adroitly, displaying a gift for explaining complex economic issues that was unmatched. Unfortunately, he knows it and, like most celebrities, he cannot resist crowing in his memoirs: “I am now credited in some commentaries with gifts of foresight that Nostradamus might have envied… I had begun to achieve serious celebrity status… With celebrity status came, I was told, an ability to move markets…

my comments had come close to bringing down leading banks, particularly Barclays… Such celebrity status as I have enjoyed does not rest on just a few good one-liners or ­personal anecdotes… I am often asked why I am not the party leader.” And, finally, my favourite: “I have many faults but vanity is not one of them.’’

Quite how Nick Clegg will feel about being patted on the head, told his time will come “later”, and described as “big enough to welcome a high-profile deputy”, I am not sure. Something tells me that Cable may not be an entirely congenial colleague on the Lib Dem benches these days. But then his career has been, as he puts it, “a long march”, with many dark valleys, both personal and professional. He is 66. Given that it seems highly unlikely he will ever hold government office, why shouldn’t he enjoy his Indian summer? The Vulcan, it turns out, is only human after all.

Free Radical by Vince Cable
Atlantic £19.99 pp358

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