Cable: Britons obsessed with property

Nick Clegg comes across better in private than in public and will improve gradually, Vince Cable told a Times fringe meeting at the party conference yesterday, in a candid admission that the Lib Dem leader is struggling to make an impact with voters.

In the conference hall, Mr Cable, who served as acting leader for two months when Sir Menzies Campbell resigned last year, was given a rapturous reception by party activists for a keynote speech that painted the Lib Dems as the party of stability.

Politicians of other parties had yet to catch up with the new era of austerity, Mr Cable said. Speaking shortly before delegates approved proposals for £20 billion tax and spending cuts, the party's Treasury spokesman said that house prices needed to fall to more realistic and affordable levels. “We need to confront our national obsession with property. Houses are homes to live in; not gambling chips.”

Later Mr Cable stirred controversy on the fringe when he was asked about his own ambitions and replied with a frank assessment of Mr Clegg's first nine months as leader.

James Harding, Editor of The Times, who chaired the meeting, asked Mr Cable whether he thought he had made a mistake in not having stood for the leadership himself. Mr Cable declined to reply directly: he did not want to “go over all that again”.

He added: “Nick is very good. This will gradually be appreciated. I work with him on a daily basis. I see things that you don't see, most of you.”

Mr Cable said: “One of the hopes of this conference is that some of [the party's] very positive personality will get through to people, and he will be very good, a very good leader, I am absolutely confident about that.”

Mr Clegg has been attempting to bind Mr Cable more closely into the leadership's project in recent weeks, making a noticeable effort to trumpet his Treasury spokesman by name at regular intervals. Well-placed Lib Dem sources say that relations between Mr Cable and Mr Clegg have improved but that after the leadership election there was a rocky few months.

At yesterday's fringe meeting Mr Cable also appeared to criticise Mr Clegg's predecessors Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies. A good performance at Prime Minister's Questions was taken for granted now, he said, but Mr Clegg's “predecessors had terrible trouble with that. But that's now part of his routine. He's a very good colleague - talks, doesn't get isolated in that little room upstairs which traps Lib Dem leaders of the past.”

Asked whether the Lib Dems could overtake Labour, Mr Cable made another surprising admission: that the party can lack nerve. “I think maybe in a sense we lack self-confidence. However hard we work, we often still think of ourselves as the third party.” Structural changes were under way in British politics, with Labour at “rock bottom” even before the recession has begun to bite - so it was impossible to say what might happen.

He derided the Tories as a “phoney religious cult”. David Cameron's Conservatives were “plausible, oleaginous, well-bred salesmen who are marketing a new brand of snake oil”, he said.

He added: “If there are any proceeds to share, their top tax priority is to lift millionaires - indeed, double millionaires - out of inheritance tax; his second is to remove the burden of stamp duty from share dealers”.

The Lib Dem strategy is to appeal to low and middle-income earners, particularly those in Tory seats, by pointing out that they would do better financially under a Lib Dem government.

Mr Cable said: “I keep reading in the press that some of our activists don't like the language of tax-cutting; they think it is ‘right wing'. But I don't see what is right wing about wanting to cut the taxes of millions of people who earn less or barely more than the equivalent of the minimum wage.”

Polling by Populus for The Times shows that the Lib Dems are seen as being compassionate but not having the best policies to run the economy. Even though Mr Cable gave warning about the housing bubble and the debt crisis before any other politician, this has not translated into support for the party on economic issues.

Mr Cable denied that he had been soft-pedalling his attacks on Gordon Brown, pointing to a passage in his conference speech where he had compared the Prime Minister to a “twitching corpse”.

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