Vince Cable lives to fight another day in the Coalition

Saved for the nation – and for the Strictly Christmas special too. The Coalition has bent over backwards to keep Dr Cable in the team and he will carry on, weakened and forbidden to go near the Murdoch/BSkyB takeover bid. And 70 civil servants wake up to find they’re working in a different department (responsiblity for media regulation goes to Culture) to save his skin.

Vince Cable showed the way he saw the world in his Conference speech in Liverpool in September. He spoke of the horrors of “take no prisoners” capitalism which “kills competition.”

He also, in that speech, took a strikingly different approach to coalition politics from the “total ownership” approach of his leader Nick Clegg and the Clegg inner circle. Vince Cable‘s approach was to advertise differences within the Coalition in the hope that voters (and party activists) give you credit for the policy trophies you picked up on the way.

Clegg believes that approach simply won’t work and the Lib Dems will prosper or fall depending on whether the Coalition as a whole is seen as a good thing not because of what individual policy concessions were picked up on the way.

There was real anger in Clegg’s inner circle about that speech, anger echoed when they saw this morning’s Telegraph front page. Vince Cable’s political errors will reinforce the Clegg clan’s view that you can’t pick and choose which bits of the Coalition you like, you can’t mutter partial disapproval out the corner of your mouth – you have to take total ownership of the whole project.

Problem is that without Vince in the top team the whole project just got a lot less appealing for a significant portion of Lib Dems who felt he was the left of centre canary still breathing in the Tory-dominated mine … if he snuffed it, politically, what would it say to them about the air quality?