Vince Cable: can he revive the Lib Dems?

Vince Cable is no stranger to Lib Dem leadership, said Paula Keaveney on The Conversation. Ten years ago, he was touted as a contender to replace Menzies Campbell. He didn’t stand – but he did stand in, until Nick Clegg was appointed. Now the former business secretary has taken the reins on a more permanent basis. He formally declared his candidacy last month, and when no other contenders emerged from the party’s pool of just 12 MPS before last week’s deadline, he became, at 74, Britain’s oldest party leader since Churchill resigned in 1955, aged 80. “There is a huge gap in the centre of British politics, and I intend to fill it,” Cable said. He indicated that he would start by exploring ways of easing inequality by, say, aligning capital gains tax with income tax.

At 74, Cable is not too old, said Deborah Orr in The Guardian, but he is “too tardy”. He should have put himself forward ten years ago, and so perhaps have spared the party the damage wrought by the decision to go into that “awful coalition”. Clegg’s slavish support for the Tories was such a disaster for the party that it cost Sir Vince his own seat in 2015, and there was really no hope for the Lib Dems at the last election, under our first-past-the-post system. Neither of the main parties were offering an alternative to Brexit, yet left-leaning Remainers knew that to get the Tories out, they had to vote Labour. Cable is now the only party leader offering a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal – but the chances of a substantial proportion of the electorate taking him up on it, and so splitting the anti-tory vote, “are negligible”.

It’s funny that Cable is making “exit from Brexit” such a central plank of his leadership, said Asa Bennett in The Daily Telegraph. Only a year ago, he warned his party that seeking to undo Brexit at this point was “disrespectful” to the electorate, and counterproductive. Yet now he is having to sell that same policy with a straight face. Is this what his party wants? A leader offering the same approach as Tim Farron, “but with greyer hair”? The Lib Dems face a dilemma, said Philip Collins in The Times. If they can come up with some tub-thumping policies, they could – given the EU mess engulfing the Tories, and the feuds within Labour – win enough protest votes to play a key role in the formation of a future government. But were they to get back into power, they’d immediately once again lose their appeal as a sanctuary for protest voters. To break this cycle, the fissures in the two main parties will have to split wide open. If they do, then Sir Vince’s “final act” might get interesting.