Advertisement

If Vince Cable is the Lib Dems' saviour, they don't seem entirely convinced | John Crace

Vince Cable gives his speech in Bournemouth.
Vince Cable gives his speech in Bournemouth. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Four days at a Liberal Democrat conference can feel like three days too many. There aren’t many heavyweights to go round and by the time the conference reaches its final day, most of them have already said most of what they came to say several times over at different events. Stay for long enough and you can feel as if you are in an echo chamber, and not just because there aren’t that many people in the audience.

Come the buildup to the leader’s closing speech, even the most committed Lib Dems were beginning to look a bit vacant. Sarah Olney was given a special consolation prize for losing her seat to Zac Goldsmith in the general election, while Layla Moran, who unseated the Tory Nicola Blackwood, was dragged on stage during the annual whip-round – hear the sound of one coin clapping – to share her love of Disney theme parks with a Lib Dem strategist called Sean.

Then came Vince Cable. Not just the star of the show, but pretty much the whole show itself. He’d hoped to come on stage to the soundtrack of Skyfall until someone had told him the first words of that were “This is the end”, so he had to settle for the theme music to Ski Sunday. Most people’s thoughts immediately turned to Eddie the Eagle. The plucky British underdog who took on the world. And failed. Declaring that you are going to be the next prime minister when your party only has 12 MPs is an exercise in hubris. Or self-delusion.

A polite ripple of applause greeted his arrival. Both Nick Clegg and Tim Farron used to get ovations. If Vince is to be the Lib Dems’ saviour, his party is yet to be wholly convinced. Vince may have gravitas, but he doesn’t have much charisma. He most closely resembles a moderately threatening bank manager.

“It’s good, today, to be amongst friends,” he began, looking around a hall with so many empty seats they might even have been close friends, before going on to list the things the Lib Dems couldn’t be blamed for. The Iraq war, the financial crisis and Brexit. When you are struggling to work out what exactly your purpose is, it sometimes helps to define yourself by what you are not. Not that Vince was going to duck the difficult questions. He’d been part of the coalition and he was proud of the Lib Dems’ record in government. It was just a shame that almost none of the electorate had felt the same way. Win some, lose some.

After a brief sideswipe at Boris Johnson – his sister Rachel, who had spoken at a fringe meeting, was meant to have been given a front row seat but she wisely chose to remain more anonymous – Vince went for Donald Trump. Or the Giant Tweeter as he called him. It was sod’s law that it was just at this moment that the BBC and Sky decided they’d had more than enough of Vince and switched to the Donald’s warmongering speech to the UN.

Undeterred, Vince carried on with his greatest hits, sounding more and more like his own tribute act. The delegates wanted to believe he could lead them to the Promised Land but they just couldn’t manage to stay awake to make the journey. He didn’t want a second referendum, he wanted a first referendum on the facts. Boom, boom. After slagging off both Labour and the Tories, he called for an end to tribal party politics. Boom, boom. “Hope counters despair,” he said in a depressed monotone. “Hope can inspire. Hope can achieve change.” Vince is the only politician who can make the word hope sound so hopeless.

The audience willed him on to the finish. Vince had only been party leader for nine weeks so they could afford to cut him some slack. It would have been nice if he could have come up with something like a properly costed policy rather than a fantasy wish-list, but it was what it was. “But I am optimistic too for our party,” Vince paused. Something about that sentence felt wrong. It should have read: “But I am too optimistic for our party.”

At the end, the applause was polite. Nothing more. Many delegates had headed for the exits long before Vince left the hall himself. There again, it was possible they had also switched to the Trump speech and were heading for their nuclear bunkers while there was still time.