While Anna Soubry’s short joke about Nigel Farage on Marr has been causing the biggest row, it was actually Vince Cable’s interview earlier in the programme that was clearly intended to annoy. The Business Secretary has been quite quiet of late, particularly after a rather humiliating conference season. But today he went much, much further than his boss Nick Clegg in differentiating the Lib Dems from the Tories.
While he repeatedly referred to his leader’s work in blocking the 75,000 proposed by Theresa May in a leaked Home Office document, Cable repeated his fears about the Help to Buy scheme and, significantly, warned that cuts to public services were endangering ‘the social fabric’. Most in the Coalition are breathing a sigh of relief that 2013 turned out to be far less politically bruising a year than they had feared (see Fraser’s column and his Coffee House post for more details) .
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