Is Cable now ready to dance on the Coalition’s grave?

I heard a funny anecdote over the weekend, in which a reasonably well-placed source insisted that if Labour gets to negotiate with the LibDems after the next election, they’ll demand the head of Nick Clegg as a precursor to talks. Nothing like a bit of bitchy revenge if you’re on the Left – and this is especially ironic as a yarn, given that it was Labour’s own spinelessness over three years that gave Slick Nick the chance to say Brown Must Go in the first place.

That said, lots of people have now got it in for Nick, not least the middle-ranking Tory Ministers who keep getting patronising calls from him about what they’re doing. But perhaps the most important of these Bring me the Headofs is the Business Secretary Vince Cable….aided but not as yet fully abetted by his close ally Simon Hughes. The Slog has posted before about Hughes as the wise old hand staying Vinny’s sword as long as the LibDems are facing annihilation in any snap election. But now things may be moving along.

Cable was miserable from the moment he realised – literally, as Dave was on his way to the Palace – that he was going to serve in a Government with Tories in it. His glumness increased six weeks ago when the TUC reversed their invitation to have him speak at Conference. And then he was ticked off bigtime by Cameron ten days ago for being too off-message. There are some observers who claim Vince was trying to get fired; if so, the PM disabused him of this idea in no uncertain terms: ‘if you’re going, then you’ll have to resign’ seems to have been the message.

Cable thinks Cameron was bluffing – and he may indeed be right. Simon Hughes, I understand, tends to agree. The LibDems outside the Cabinet tent are now a Coalition partner looking for a popular reason for Vince to defect: but they won’t move until they find it. Events in the last few days, however, might be about to help move things along.

Although the Guardian has been touting the Council House tenure issue as the thing likely to get Cameron into a pickle, this isn’t what I hear: I hear Hughes is violently opposed to the idea, but having flown a kite, the Prime Minister knows when to back off. One Tory MP told me late last week that Cameron had “only said it anyway to sound tough to the Right” – which would also make sense.

No, the event on the horizon is much bigger than that. Unsurprisingly, the Business Minister has seen the upcoming Bank of England’s outlook summary due for release this week. It raises the unsurprising spectre of lower economic growth than previously forecast – and fingers the austerity plans as the culprit. I understand Mr Cable thinks the Bank is right. Both he and Hughes allegedly see this as potentially populist reason to resign on principle….and claim a more radical approach than anything on offer from a Labour Party in the middle of an astonishingly tedious leadership election that offers nothing new.

Were Cable to resign and Hughes to lead a rebellion, then Nick Clegg would face the same stark choice as Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 – do I stay on and take part, or do I go and face a wilderness full of brigands? I think he’d stay. And so do Hughes and Cable.

The Slog thinks Vince and Simon (both in fact highly principled men) would be mad to pull this one; first off, Labour isn’t ready, and second it’s still hard to see how a LibDem Party further to the Left could really be distinctive in an election involving Labour. Last but not least, as a Party right now, the Liberal Democrats are all but dead: the local organisations have been decimated by defection, and as the ‘disaffected’ non-voting couch-potatoes showed us in the last election, they are entirely capable of living up to their name.

But the feeling is growing among the Parliamentary LiDems – I’m told it is now a clear majority – that further association with the Coalition is not a good idea: their support is dropping, and if tarred with a Cameronian mess, they may be wiped out. And hanging hath no anxiety like MPs worried about their seats.