Down to the wire with Cable

After first chancing his arm with Michael Heseltine, Peter Hennessy (also a columnist for The Tablet) devoted the second instalment of his new series of Reflections to a sit-down with the former Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Sir Vince Cable (9 August).

If Lord Heseltine, the magazine tycoon turned Tory MP, had been a certain kind of self-made man, then Sir Vince, with his somewhat austere grounding in the northern working class, was clearly another. Nonconformity, shyness and a grammar-school education (“divisive” but of great benefit to him personally) all played their part in his slow ascent through public life, but so, too, did a pervasive sense of inner hurt.

While Cable was careful not to spill too many beans from the cauldron of his upbringing, you got the feeling that his parents’ unhappy marriage – this in an era where divorce was unthinkable – weighed heavy on him to the point of “cauterising his emotions”.