I’ve been amused to see the rush-to-rubbish Vince Cable today among some right-wing bloggers following his appearance on BBC1’s The Politics Show.
Iain Dale (but of course) was first up to tweet: “Well done Jon Sopel for finally exposing Vince Cable as the overrated flipflopper that he is.” He was soon followed by ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie, and Wall Street Journal’s Iain Martin, who has a pet-obsession with Vince’s popularity.
Having missed the show at lunchtime, I sat down nervously to catch up on iPlayer (Vince’s inteview begins about 3 minutes in) fully expecting him to be eviscerated by Jon Sopel.
In fact, what I watched was a robust interview in which Vince more than held his own, and made the key points that (1) the Labservatives have consistently opposed Lib Dem attempts to clean up our politics, and (2) the Tories need to explain how they’re going to fund their various tax-cuts if not through raising VAT.
Why have the Tories got it in for Vince?
Which left me wondering: what got Iain, Tim and Iain so excited that they dashed into the twitblogosphere to try and swing the media narrative against Vince? (Besides the inevitable election-time partisan point-scoring, that is).
It’s clear enough: the Tories are desperately worried about ‘The Vince Factor’, and how well it’s playing among the voters they think of as ‘theirs’. The idea people might trust a Lib Dem as their preferred chancellor over and above the Tories’ offering is such a shock to the system the Tories have only one answer: consistently to rubbish Vince in the hope they can tarnish his image. To play the man not the ball.
Vince’s reputation: the reality
It’s been tried before. The closest Vince’s detractors came was during Andrew Neil’s Straight Talk show broadcast last September, in which the Tory-turned-journalist tried to get the better of Vince by flinging a load of seemingly contradictory quotes at him. The problems with this approach are twofold:
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(1) Vince has never actually pretended to have been 100% right 100% of the time, despite the claims made on his behalf – indeed, it’s his very pragmatic, measured, moderate approach that has won over the British public in the last two and a bit years; and
(2) most of the claims made against Vince – his supposed inconsistencies – don’t actually stack up when looked at objectively. Don’t take my word for it, simply read the Channel 4 News FactCheck page which last week asked Is Vince Cable’s economic reputation fully deserved? Their fair and balanced conclusion:
Vince Cable has been widely praised – and rightly so – for warning of the dangers of Britain living off credit. But the Lib Dem eulogies need to be treated with some scepticism. Like any politician, when the facts change he changes his mind. Which goes to show that Saint Vince is human after all.
I think the Tories would do better to worry less about rubbishing Vince, and worry instead about the fact that their candidate for Chancellor, George Osborne, just isn’t up to the job, a conclusion even top Tories themselves seem to have reached.
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13 Comments
This “Saint Vince” business is nonsense –
It is worth noting that Iain Martin rarely has a thought that fails to enter Tim Montgomerie’s mind. Not all the words at the end of that sentence are necessary.
Tim Montgomerie has a mind? 😉
Stephen, you need to realise he is not the messiah, he’s just a sound-bite peddler who changes his position constantly. I don’t know what his latest position is on nationalising the banks.
That quote from Channel 4 News Fact Check annoys me, mainly due to this bit:
I wish any politician would change their mind when the facts change,it just isn’t the case, but doing so is something to be applauded. Examples where politicians haven’t adapted their thinking to to accord with the facts are many and varied, but things like drugs policy are a good place to start.
Stephen you missed out Fraser ‘the social chameleon’ Nelson. Let me help you out –
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5904913/even-cable-cant-defend-the-lib-dems-misleading-poster.thtml
As I pointed out in the comments section, what the Lib Dems did with their VAT poster, the Tories did with their Death Tax poster.
Can’t find the piece where Mr Nelson laid into his Conservative chums for the Tombstone effort but given the word of the day is ‘consistency’, I’m sure he did somewhere.
On a tactical level, Vince and Nick should play up to this. Remember, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. You’ve got ’em scared. People want change but Cameron isn’t it and the public knows it.
Given the Lib Dem Party’s messianic attachment to the EU, poor Vince Cable could hardly have said that he didn’t want to scrap the Pound and join the Euro, could he?
But even so, he ought to have known that it is normally a mistake unnecessarily to give away an instrument of economic policy adjustment – unnecessarily, that is, except for those rooting for a single country called Europe.
The EU will destroy the Liberal Democrats. They cannot be trusted to stand up for our country against the EU bureaucracy. The polls will start to reflect this. I see the latest figure is 16%..
The press only built Vince up because they reckoned Clegg could be made uncomfortable by it. I imagine if you really did comb through the facts, you’d find he doesn’t get everything right and sometimes takes ideological positions that are subjective to a degree, but he’s still a hell of a lot better at grasping the issues and asking the right questions than the other two. Still, goodies and baddies is how the press works, and Dale & co are wasting their time being sore about it – what they lose on the swings they gain on the roundabouts.
I imagine there is a degree of backstage Tory commentator co-ordination, and they have decided to try to knock him off the pedestal. I have been seeing some signs on the comment threads. Friday night, a Cable-related article went up on the Guardian. Less than an hour later, the four or five (quite similar) hostile comments close to the top of the thread had 100 recommends. I’m on CiF most days, and that never happens that quickly. The hostile comments have now got 600+ apiece which usually only happens when someone slags off Peter Mandelson in a highly amusing manner. I’d also been on Cable-related articles earlier in the week where the positive comments were getting the most recommends; it seems unlikely that his stock should reverse that quickly and dramatically in the same community.
Stunning waste of time, of course, and at least it’s keeping them off the streets. The whole circus is quite depressing really.
The real problem is that none of the main parties is coming anywhere near to telling us how they would really deal with the deficit.
In his interview on the Today programme, Nick Clegg said that the Lib Dem proposals would come within “a few billions” of eliminating _half_ of the structural deficit (estimated at something like £70bn). When asked about the other half, he described the proposals as “a start”. I can only assume that means that if the Lib Dems did actually find themselves in government, they would have to find a further £30-40bn from some combination of tax rises and spending cuts.
That’s something like three times the amount currently under discussion in relation to National Insurance.
I guess the once sainted Vince will now have to remove the halo from off his shoulders now that John Sopel had managed to get him to admit that he would not rule out a rise in VAT after that bombshell poster accusing the Tories of also not ruling it out.
As for the specific points being made, I look forward to them being made to Vince Cable, ideally by someone like Jeremy Paxman and lets see what he says.
I think it is worth pointing out that the economic recession has actually made the whole political establishment look rediculous. When Adam Smith referred to the “hidden hand”, this was intrepreted by both New Labour and the Tories to mean that markets were self correcting, and therefore did not need anything more than “light touch” regulation. The Tories claim that the Bank of England should have been in charge of regulation, but that is just shifting responsibility. They too did not give regulation the priority that it should have had, because philosophically they did not value it.
However the positions Vince Cable took; that the mounting levels of debt was a serious problem that needed attending to, and his opposition to the demutualisation of the building societies show that he has come out of this far better than Osbourne or Brown/Darling.
Since the crash has happened he has continued to show the leadership lacking from the other parties, on for example the nationalisation of Northern Rock.
Really he is head and shoulders above everyone else and deserves the credit he gets.
At the same time he is not unafraid to make himself unpopular, and why not? These are tough times and a lot of poeple made some serious errors of judgement and that includes many of his critics.
@ Paul Wakeford.
The point is, the Tories’ sums don’t add up unless you add in a missing ‘x’ to the equation. The Lib Dems’ sums DO add up without the ‘x’.
The Tories have raised VAT in the past, and they will do so again. Their budget has more holes than a Swiss cheese.
@ Dane Clouston. More EU-hating nonsense from someone ironically called “Dane”. BTW, our rolling average is 20%, not 16%. What’s UKIP’s rolling average, then?
“Robert C”
Why do you think that I hate the EU? I do not.
I do hold the valid liberal political opinion that we should no longer be ruled by or contribute to the European Union and its bureaucracy, given our global history and connections and our entirely different agricultural and fishing interests.
I regret that LIb Dems such as yourself reject this view and also the way in which you do so.
Of course I wish UKIP’s rolling average were higher – certainly high enough to elect Nigel Farage in Buckingham as a clear and courageous “Leave the EU” MP voice in the next Parliament. In the meantime I see that the latest London Poll puts the EU-linked Lib Dems at 16%.
“The real problem is that none of the main parties is coming anywhere near to telling us how they would really deal with the deficit.”
True. The answer is, of course, they will deal with it with an immediate mammoth tax rise, as soon as the election is over. Irrespective of which party it is that wins.
The public are loudly complaining that the political parties will not tell them the truth. If, however, a political party were to poke its nose above the parapet and admit the truth about the mammoth tax rise, that party would immediately plunge in the polls. The thing is, you just can’t trust the public. They’re even more venal, self-deluding and self-serving than the politicians are!
Faced with this schizophrenic attitude from the public, Vince is being as honest as he dares, and more honest than his competitors. I suspect it is this level of honesty, as much as the economic foresight, which impresses the supporters of “Saint Vince.” And reasonably enough, I think.