According to the Daily Fail, Vince Cable is working on a novel, a political thriller:

Cable, 72, is already deep into the tome, having already bashed out 40,000 words.

It will apparently be a political thriller, set around a controversial arms contract affecting India and Britain. Details thus far are scant, but a friend informs me the prose will be quite ‘pared-back and spare’, in the style of Irish novelist William Trevor. Cable certainly has insight into Anglo-Indian relations, not just because he is a former government minister. His first wife Olympia, who passed away in 2001, was Goan. ‘I am indeed well advanced on a novel,’ Cable tells me sheepishly. ‘But there are a few hurdles before it gets to publication stage.’

Paddy Ashdown apparently had a 120,000 novel turned down for publication. We’d be happy to serialise it, of course…

I trust Vince’s new calling as a potential Man Booker Prize winning novelist fares rather better than his Lib Dem colleague, former leader Paddy Ashdown, who had a 120,000-word novel turned down by his agent earlier this year.

My agent looked at me quite sadly and said: “Paddy, you can write good history books, but you can’t write thrillers. Give it up — stick with what you can do,” ’ Ashdown told me recently.

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