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Sir Vince Cable

What would your younger self make of your life today? 77, author and former politician

- Interview by Boudicca Fox-Leonard

When I was younger my politics were a bit up in the air. My dad was very right-wing Conservati­ve. My mother was a closet liberal, which wasn’t something you owned up to in our household. I navigated the landscape with some difficulty.

Like a lot of families, ours was very ambitious. We started out in a working-class terrace house in York with an outside loo. My mum worked on the production line and my dad had been a manual worker, but he’d gone off to college after the war and got a diploma. They were on their way up. When I was seven we got our first semi-detached house and gradually worked our way up through the housing market. We were part of a generation where self-improvemen­t was the way of life. I was expected to do well and reflect glory on the family.

I doubt my younger self would recognise me today. I was quite inarticula­te and not a very good communicat­or; they are things I’ve had to learn. People around me probably saw me as an ambitious young man, who was probably going to be successful in life but in a much narrower way than what’s happened, perhaps as a scientist or economist.

However, even as a teenager I had fantasies of a high-profile existence. Against all sensible judgment I got the lead in the school play when I was 16, as Macbeth. Secretly I fancied myself as the next Laurence Olivier. There was part of me that wanted to be an actor, but my background was so convention­al my father would have been horrified.

He was a man of his time; a passionate believer in the Empire. There were a lot of racial attitudes that went with it, which caused some trouble when I married Olympia, my Indian wife, but we reconciled in due course. That whole issue of cultural identity was very much where I came from. I wrote about identity politics and multicultu­ralism – what is now called “wokeness” – 25 years ago in a booklet for the think tank Demos, but it was all a bit ahead of its time.

My late wife saw herself as Indian and British at the same time. We would be much more comfortabl­e in a world where it was natural and healthy for people to have different identities. That’s what makes society stronger.

I’m grateful that I had good teachers who encouraged me to challenge orthodoxie­s. Of my two best friends, with whom I would walk around

York of an evening sharing a bag of chips, one was a Communist, the other a Telegraph-reading Conservati­ve.

When you’re a teenager you don’t think 50 years ahead, you’re thinking in five years, 10 years. You want instant gratificat­ion, but that never happened to me. The whole process was very slow.

I dabbled in politics at university [he read economics at Cambridge],

I wrote about wokeness 25 years ago

at the fault line between the Liberals and the Labour party, and campaigned in the ’64 and ’66 elections. Then, when I lived in Glasgow in the late 1960s, I got involved in the city’s politics and became a councillor. There were big issues at the time; Europe, racism, apartheid. The fact that I had a mixed family of my own [Cable’s first wife Olympia died in 2001] contribute­d to my interest in politics. I got in at the 5th attempt, 30 years after I first stood for Parliament. There had been a long process of disappoint­ment, but because I didn’t get into Parliament early I was able to have a proper family life. I had a good marriage and three children, and I got to spend a lot of time with them. A happy home was something I was determined to have when I was a teenager, because my own wasn’t. After the crash in 2008 I was a bit overwhelme­d by the media attention. T o some extent I’d said the right things, focusing on the excesses of the financial sector. But what tends to happen in British politics is that for a while you can do no wrong (it was me then and Rishi Sunak now), and then people want to take you down. The high point of my political life was being part of the Cabinet and the work I did as Secretary of State for five years. People are very critical of that government, but I’m a defender of it. I think it was a good phase in British politics and the government worked well. I can look back on things I initiated, many of which have survived and continue to be useful.

Sir Vince Cable will speak at HowTheLigh­tGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival, on May 29 (howtheligh­tgetsin.org)

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 ??  ?? Cable minded: A young Vince with his father,
Len, at Westminste­r in the 1950s
Cable minded: A young Vince with his father, Len, at Westminste­r in the 1950s

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