Lib Dem deputy leader Vince Cable’s hotly-anticipated autobiography Free Radical is published next month – you can pre-order a copy from Amazon here – and is currently being serialised in the Mail.
Excerpts published so far deal principally with Vince’s childhood growing up in York, ranging from the personal (his mother’s breakdown) to his occasional delinquency (terrorising neighbourhood cats and dogs with an air rifle) to his mixed emotions when his parents died (“I felt a vague sense of sadness and guilt that there was nothing more: no tears.”).
There’s also an intriguing diversion into Vince’s initiation into early mating rituals:
As a teenager, I was terrified of girls and uncomfortable with women in general. My friends in those days measured relationships on a primitive metric: Grade One was holding hands; Grade Two was full-on kissing; at Grade Three hands got inside bras; Grade Four was heavy petting; and Grade Five was intercourse and beyond.
Conversation, let alone love, didn’t enter into it. A few of my precocious friends had reached Grade Five early on, or claimed to have. Most of us, however, were clustered at the bottom of this ladder of sexual achievements.
I was generally thought to be eligible, and received plenty of encouragement, including being paired off with a dark, flirtatious beauty called Carol. After two circuits of Hob Moor, where courtships occurred, I had not dared to utter a word or approached within a foot of her and she suggested I try someone else.
Poor Vince: he didn’t have much more luck with Audrey, Mary or Gwyneth either.
To read all about it, click here …
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6 Comments
I must be very innocent/naive… What is there ‘beyond’ ‘intercourse’?
How nice of Vince to name his autobiography after the (late, lamented) LDYS magazine! Who’d have thought it?
Alimony.
I look forward to reading `Free Radical’ by the brilliant Vince Cable voted the most trusted politician among equals.
I have already read Paddy Ashdown`s `A Fortunate Life’,Alan Beith`s `A View from the North’,Ming Campbell`s `My Autobiography’ and Shirley William`s `Climbing the Bookshelves’.All being a tour de force and every page capable of sending legions of Lib.Dems. onto the streets in the coming Elections.
All four autobiographies are uniquely inspiring,quintessentially Liberal and humane and charismatic in leadership and a challenge to all `Liberal Youth’ to get elected and help change British politics for good..
Baroness Williams` book is a bridgehead in changing the current political tide in favour of human decency and integrity and in fomenting much liberal progress today, as she helped build the foundation stones for the first 20 years of the breaking the mould history of the Liberal Democrat Party.
We have Vince speaking at our Annual Dinner (24th October). Anyone interested there are still a few tickets left. Of course you have to get yourself to Cullompton, Devon…
I assumed this would add my website but alas not… anyone wanting further details [email protected]