Is Lord Oakeshott speaking for Vince Cable?

Cable has previously suggested that the coalition could end early, a demand now made by the Lib Dem peer.

(Photo By Business Secretary Vince Cable speaks at the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow last year. Photograph: Getty Images.)

With his usual impeccable timing, Lord Oakeshott has chosen the launch day of the Lib Dems’ European election campaign to call for the party to withdraw from the coalition immediately after the contest. He told Channel 4 News:

I think the problem is we have a very good message on what we’ve achieved, but it’s being drowned out by being in government. Four years on, we’ve achieved most of what we set out to do in the coalition. Now, we must get out of government so we can put our distinctive Liberal Democrat messsage across, both about what we’ve achieved in government and what we are going to achieve in the next parliament separately from the Tories.

Straight away after the May elections, we must give ourselves a year to get our own messages firmly across. It’s quite clear that we Liberal Democrats, having done our duty for the country, supporting the government, getting our reforms through, are actually in grave danger ourselves. It’s not in the country’s interests for our distinctive message not to be heard.

The key question, as one Lib Dem source suggested to me, is whether Oakeshott his speaking for his close ally Vince Cable (with whom he was on a party fundraising trip today). It’s worth recalling that at last year’s Lib Dem conference, Cable suggested the coalition could end well before the general election. He said of the chance of an early split: “It’s certainly possible. We are not at the stage of talking about that process. It is obviously a very sensitive one. It has got to be led by the leader. We have not yet had those conversations.”

For those speculative remarks, he was slapped down by Danny Alexander, who declared: “This coalition will continue until the end of this Parliament as we promised for the very simple reason that we have a very big job to do – to clean up the economic mess that Labour left behind and entrench the recovery we are starting to see.”

Alexander, who, as I wrote recently, has been on manoeuvres, is continuing to attract the interest of his colleagues. One source told me: “We are all talking about Danny. His moves at the moment are bizarre.”