So where does Cable's reputation as the best Chancellor we never had come from? It is based on his background: the gritty northern grammar school lad who read economics at Cambridge, gained a doctorate and rose to be chief economist at Shell.
Yet this reputation for economic insight arising from business experience does not withstand scrutiny. The vast bulk of his career was spent, not in business, but in the bureaucratic playground of international development from the Sixties to the Nineties. Cable rose smoothly from the Foreign Office, via the World Commission on Environment and Development at the United Nations, to the Overseas Development Institute, the Commonwealth Secretariat and Chatham House — with a brief interlude at Shell. Only in 1995, by which time he was already in his fifties, did he move back to Shell. He stayed there only until 1997 before entering Parliament.
Thus Cable's much-vaunted private-sector career actually lasted less than five years. Even his much younger colleague David Laws clocked up seven years at J.P. Morgan and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, while Sajid Javid (see opposite) managed nearly two decades. Cable never got his hands dirty in the cut-throat world inhabited by the mainly small businesses over which he presides, but enjoyed a couple of brief sojourns at one of the largest of multinational corporations, where his political contacts were doubtless useful. Leaping from one gravy train to the next, he alighted safely at what was always his intended destination: Westminster.
What would Cable do, if next year he were to achieve his ambition as Chancellor alongside Ed Miliband in a Labour-Liberal coalition? The likelihood is that he would relax the strict spending and borrowing limits established by George Osborne, scrap the long-term aim of reducing the size of the state, while extending his policy at "Biz" of backing winners and meddling across the board. At 72 Vince Cable would be the oldest Chancellor in modern times. He would almost certainly also prove to be the worst.
Yet this reputation for economic insight arising from business experience does not withstand scrutiny. The vast bulk of his career was spent, not in business, but in the bureaucratic playground of international development from the Sixties to the Nineties. Cable rose smoothly from the Foreign Office, via the World Commission on Environment and Development at the United Nations, to the Overseas Development Institute, the Commonwealth Secretariat and Chatham House — with a brief interlude at Shell. Only in 1995, by which time he was already in his fifties, did he move back to Shell. He stayed there only until 1997 before entering Parliament.
Thus Cable's much-vaunted private-sector career actually lasted less than five years. Even his much younger colleague David Laws clocked up seven years at J.P. Morgan and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, while Sajid Javid (see opposite) managed nearly two decades. Cable never got his hands dirty in the cut-throat world inhabited by the mainly small businesses over which he presides, but enjoyed a couple of brief sojourns at one of the largest of multinational corporations, where his political contacts were doubtless useful. Leaping from one gravy train to the next, he alighted safely at what was always his intended destination: Westminster.
What would Cable do, if next year he were to achieve his ambition as Chancellor alongside Ed Miliband in a Labour-Liberal coalition? The likelihood is that he would relax the strict spending and borrowing limits established by George Osborne, scrap the long-term aim of reducing the size of the state, while extending his policy at "Biz" of backing winners and meddling across the board. At 72 Vince Cable would be the oldest Chancellor in modern times. He would almost certainly also prove to be the worst.
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