Racist, St Vinny? Is it cos I is white?

VINCE CABLE is the Chauncey Gardiner of Westminster, an oceangoing idiot whose every imbecilic utterance is treated with great reverence by the Boys In The Bubble.

For the uninitiated, Chauncey is a character from a 1970 American novel, Being There, which was turned into a movie, starring Peter Sellers, nine years later.

Sellars plays a simple-minded, middle-aged gardener called Chance, who rarely leaves the Washington compound where he lives and has taken his entire world-view from what he’s seen on television.

One day, the President of the United States happens upon him, and mistakes Chance for a highly educated businessman who has fallen on hard times.

The Prez mishears his introduction to ‘Chance the Gardener’ as ‘Chauncey Gardiner’ and accepts his moronic, monosyllabic mutterings as pearls of wisdom handed down on tablets of stone. (That’s enough similes — Ed.)

As a result, Chauncey becomes an adviser to the White House, enjoying great influence, dinners with ambassadors and guest appearances on TV talk shows.

For Chauncey, read My Cousin Vinny. It has long been a mystery to me why this intellectually challenged Labour councillor-turned-Lib Dem MP has been elevated to sage status by political commentators who should know better.

Last time I saw him, he was having a cheeky little white wine poured down his throat in a private members’ club by hacks from the Observer, who subsequently presented whatever he’d told them as a front page ‘exclusive’ on the following Sunday. It was, needless to say, unexpurgated drivel.

Cable’s reputation as an economic genius dates from his time working for the Shell oil company in the early 1990s, which was overshadowed by something dodgy in Nigeria. (Best not to ask. As Georgina Hale’s sister-in-law said in that fabulous episode of Minder with Brian Glover in a syrup: it’s a phase they go through, isn’t it?) They’d have got more sense out of a petrol pump attendant.

His only other claim to fame — apart from doing the foxtrot on Strictly Come Wossname — was accusing Gordon Brown in the Commons of turning from ‘Stalin into Mr Bean’ — a line he stole shamelessly from the journalist Leo McKinstry, occcasionally of this parish, and for which Cable continues to take unwarranted credit. Chauncey Gardiner lives! During the Tory/Lib Dem coalition, he accepted the lucrative Cabinet post of Business Secretary and then boasted to gullible lobby correspondents that he intended to resign and bring down the government. He didn’t, obviously. These days Saint Vinny is leader of the Lib Dems in Parliament. I had no idea. I must have been washing my hair the day he was appointed. I thought he’d lost his seat in 2015. Apparently, he got it back again in Mother Theresa’s ill-judged If I Ruled The World election last year.

Anyway, if there’s anything Vinny loves more than the sound of his own voice, it’s Brussels.

And as far as he’s concerned, the 17.4 million of us who voted Leave are knuckle-scraping BNP racist scum.

He told his party’s Spring conference in Southport (that must have been a laugh a minute) that older voters who had chosen to quit the EU were dinosaurs who wanted to recreate the days when ‘passports were blue and faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’.

Our votes — the biggest turn-out for anything, ever — were ‘crushing the hopes and aspirations of the young for years to come’. Really? I was in a boozer in funky East London on Sunday night, packed with young people. They didn’t look as if their hopes and aspirations were being crushed by an old git like me.

Far from it. We got talking to a Belgian in a Union Flag bowler hat, who loved Britain. Next to us at the bar was a Korean bloke in a red tartan Bay City Rollers outfit, taking selfies.

I doubt any of them were following closely developments from the Lib Dem Spring conference in Southport.

Why would they? The Lib Dems are about as relevant to the real world as sit-up-and-beg typewriters. How many MPs have they got these days — eight, ten? I can’t be bothered to look it up.

YET they still have 100 members of the House of Lords. Saint Vinny and the ridiculous Nick Clegg — Westminster’s answer to Private Pike from Dad’s Army, stupid boy — have both been knighted.

(Clegg’s investiture, which he tried to keep quiet about, was brilliantly documented last week in this newspaper by — guess who? — Leo McKinstry.)

Clegg, you will recall, has made it his mission in life to overturn the referendum result and keep Britain locked into the sclerotic racket which is the EU.

Vinny, too, although he tried to pretend yesterday that he hadn’t claimed older Leave voters were racist.

Which bit of accusing us of hankering for the days when ‘faces were white’ didn’t he mean?

Saint Vinny’s intemperate ramblings about Brexit voters tells you all you need to know about the contempt in which the political class holds the people who pay their wages.

We’d get more common sense from Chauncey Gardiner.