Vince Cable had a minor stroke when he was leader of the Liberal Democrats that seriously affected his performance when giving speeches and at other political events, he reveals in a memoir published on Sunday.
The former business secretary decided to keep his health issues secret for more than a year and to soldier on as leader, until he stepped down in July 2019.
Now 79, he says in the memoir that he wrestled with whether to go public at the time, but came to the conclusion that people would have written him off as a “goner” had he done so.
On one occasion in early summer 2018 he was addressing MPs in a Brexit debate in the House of Commons. “I totally lost my bearings and for what seemed an eternity I was paralysed,” he writes.
“There weren’t many MPs in the chamber and those present were either half-asleep or working on their phones so I was able to get back into my stride without too much attention being paid. But my confidence was seriously shaken.”
The revelation about the stroke, which happened when flying to Italy in May 2018, comes towards the end of Partnership & Politics In a Divided Decade. The book weaves together Cable’s account of the 10 years starting with the formation of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010, with the memories of his wife, Rachel Smith, who kept a diary of those times.
Cable says that after been diagnosed as having had the stroke “I tried to get back into a regular routine, behaving as if nothing had happened, though it was difficult to follow long meetings and I was conscious of having a ‘funny voice’.” He now thinks he should have come clean, as this would have helped many others to deal with similar setbacks.
At the Lib Dems’ annual conference in September 2018 Cable would fluff the punchline of a joke that his spin doctor had pre-briefed to the press. Instead of referring to the Brexiters’ “erotic spasm” on leaving the EU, as he had planned, it came out as the incomprehensible “erotic spresm”. The blunder – rather than the serious content of the speech – attracted all the media attention. Smith’s concerns about her husband’s secret, and her longing for him to give up the leadership, become more evident and sharper as the weeks passed.
At one point she is annoyed that he cancels a short holiday away that she believes would have done him good. “V is fretting about his non-appearance on the news. I point out that Corbyn’s coverage is almost all negative and May’s not much better so I wish he could switch off for a week. His reaction is to give up on the short break we have planned in Dorset and hang around in the hope of getting some TV and radio which makes me cross and makes no sense.”
After the conference blunder Smith wrote: “I am hoping V will have stepped down from the leadership by next summer, making a long trip possible.”
When the coalition came into being in 2010, Cable was conflicted about teaming up with Eurosceptic Tories hell-bent on driving through massive cuts to departmental budgets.
But he accepts that Nick Clegg had no real option but to work with David Cameron and George Osborne, despite the damage that the coalition was to do to his own party.
After the coalition, and the Brexit referendum that led to Cameron’s resignation, Cable had little sympathy. “I had no reason to lament Cameron, who, behind a charming veneer had comprehensively shafted the Lib Dems, and me and had now, through incompetence and complacency, trashed the legacy of 40 years of European co-operation by his Tory and Labour predecessors.”
In an interview with the Observer about the book Cable said he had considered writing a memoir after the 2015 general election, which saw the Lib Dems all but wiped out. “That was an option to settle scores with my Tory colleagues,” he says. “But it would probably have been seen as vindictive.”
Over time, however, he became increasingly frustrated that his party was being “airbrushed from history” by both the Tories and Labour, and he wanted to stand up for the Lib Dem record in government.
“The airbrushing from history just made me increasingly angry because of the things we achieved and the things we stopped happening,” he says, citing the blocking of numerous Tory plans to curtail workers rights as chief among them.
Asked if the Lib Dems could join another coalition with the Tories after the next election, Cable is adamant. “Under current circumstances or anything like current circumstances it is inconceivable.”
As for working with Labour, this, he says, is much more likely, but even with Labour lessons of the 2010 to 2015 experience will have to be learned. He doubts whether it would be a formal arrangement in which Lib Dems take ministerial posts. “I don’t think it would be an explicit coalition because of the experience we had last time.”
