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Dr Doom’s home guard
Published 29 September 2023
Until a year ago it was a lonely business being a housing market doom-monger. The house price boom seemed unstoppable, and bold predictions that it might one day go into reverse had been wrong so many times, that the dwindling band of pessimists began to doubt even their own sanity.
So Dr Vince Cable, the Lib Dem deputy leader and shadow chancellor, deserves every bit as much credit for sticking to his guns as he got for his famous quip about Gordon Brown and his ‘remarkable transformation from Stalin to Mr Bean’. If he sometimes comes close to saying ‘told you so’ he can be forgiven because, well, he did.
The Twickenham MP’s warnings about the consequences of high levels of personal debt and high house prices did not fit with the narrative of the New Labour economic miracle and were dismissed by ministers either as scaremongering or as slightly batty.
In April, when it was becoming clear that the housing market was lurching from bad to worse, he led an opposition day debate on the issue only to find himself dismissed as a character from Dad’s Army.
‘The hon. Member for Twickenham was either running around going, “We’re doomed, we’re doomed”, or he was saying, “Don’t panic, don’t panic.” I cannot quite establish which of the two characters he was casting himself in,’ said financial secretary Jane Kennedy.
But as news from the market turned from bad to dire it was Kennedy’s colleagues who were discovering that they did not like it up ’em.
Cable was no longer the Cassandra whose prophecies nobody believed, but the respected former economist who was making much of the running with his calls for more comprehensive measures.
The man they dismissed as a cross between Private Frazer and Lance Corporal Jones was having the last laugh – and he definitely did not need permission to speak.
