Vince’s message to Nick

Brush aside the eye-catching rhetoric over business in Vince Cable’s speech and look at the political style – this was a very different approach to coalition management from the rest of the Lib Dem top table, including the party leader.

Nick Clegg studiously didn’t attack the Tories in his speech to the conference on Monday and studiously didn’t start flashing parts of a putative 2015 manifesto at the activists either. Vince did both.

He dug up the Tories’ inheritance tax pledge from the 2010 election, for instance, to make a dig at the Tories. He emphasised how much he was trying to get an income-related premium into the graduate contribution being worked on in Whitehall – “I’m doing everything I can to ensure that the graduate contribution is linked to earnings.”

He promoted a land tax for the 2015 manifesto. It was much more of a conventional party political speech, not the Clegg-style coalition age ministerial speech.

Folk close to Clegg were less than impressed. Tories won’t be too impressed either. One Tory cabinet minister told me he “loved” Nick Clegg’s speech on Monday. Vince Cable’s speech belonged to a completely different model of coalition management. Tensions, for instance over the graduate tax, were advertised. Coalition partners were mocked even if the starkest attacks were kept for Labour. 

If Vince Cable was leading the party in coalition, this speech signalled, he would handle it very differently. By implication, not missed by Nick Clegg’s friends, the current leader’s got some of the strategy and tone wrong. This wasn’t a leadership bid, but you were reminded of those distinctly, painstakingly differentiated speeches that Gordon Brown used to give at Labour conferences the day before Tony Blair’s leader’s speech.