An important interview with Vince Cable

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Ned Simons from Huffington Post interviewed Vince Cable on Valentine's Day - the Lib Dem leader was planning to meet his wife Rachel at a "nice romantic restaurant down by the river" later.

They had a wide ranging and enlightening conversation. Here are a few of the more important things Vince said.

On Brexit:

Cable says had Theresa May gone for a soft-Brexit, by which he means keeping the UK in the single market and customs union, a lot of pro-EU voters would have gone along with it. 

“I think a lot of Remainers would have said ‘ok fine, we would rather not leave, but this is something we can cope with and it’s not going to cause a lot of economic harm’,” he says. 

“The fact they are pursuing a much more extreme and also very uncertain outcome means that these divisions are not going to go away. They are becoming more extreme and acute. People will want to have a fresh look at this when they know what the outcome is. 

On the Lib Dems:

“There are some good things happening,” Cable says of his party’s position. “We have this record level of membership, lots of enthusiastic young people. We are the youngest of the three parties, I’ve discovered, in terms of average age. You go around the country and lots of kind of idealistic young people, full of energy who want to do things and that’s really good. 

“I think the other thing that pleasantly, I’m not going to say pleasantly surprised me, but which is good - we’ve got a very good cohesive team. It would be nice to have a lot more than 12 MPs, but they are pretty harmonious and work together. They are very good and it has made my life a lot easier.”

On the Coalition:

Cable says being a minister was “constantly battling against internal things”. 

“We worked pretty well together and we got agreement, but it was hard work. It was tough. Very tough,” he says. 

“But you know. I survived the obstacle course. Being in opposition is almost by definition easier. I came in politics to do things. I don’t regret having been in government.”

Going back to Brexit, Vince mentions having heard someone say that there is a kind of non-violent civil war going on.

There are certainly parallels with the English Civil War when you look at divides like Court vs Country, but the Brexiteers do not have a Cromwell.

Boy do they not have a Cromwell.