Cable, the free radical, dreams of a grand future

What is Vince Cable up to? He is on manoeuvres, keeps making attempted power grabs from George Osborne. Barely a week passes without him rattling the cage to which Cameron and Clegg have confined him  – that is, the unwieldy and yet fairly powerless Department for Business, Innovation & Skills. For all its bulk, the department doesn’t really do anything. It has the universities brief, which is important, but it is certainly not an economics department as Cable was pretending last week. “It is a bit like the German economics ministry and the finance ministry,” he claimed. “Two departments, working in parallel.” As if. Cable may like economics, but he is judged too headstrong (and, I suspect, vain) to work on the economics policy if the government. He has been kept a safe distance from it. The last thing Britain needs is the idea that its economic policy is split between two warring Cabinet members.