Have you ever thought of going into politics? Oh, come on – if Boris Johnson can do it, surely it can’t be that hard. And if it doesn’t all work out quite as planned, then you can always dash off a quick book about it, as the former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable has.
How to Be a Politician is, much like the coalition cabinet in which Cable once prominently served, a strange hybrid: half jolly careers talk, of the sort many MPs are likely to have delivered to sixth formers when visiting schools in their constituency, and half loo book. It’s padded out to a rather eye-opening extent by page after page of well-known quotes from famous politicians, which can’t have taken a researcher all that long to Google, grouped roughly by themes such as operating in government or dealing with failure. Each chunky selection of other people’s witticisms is prefaced with a short essay by Cable drawing on the experience of his own half-century in politics, also liberally sprinkled with yet more quotes from other famous politicians presumably left over from the research process (there is a lot of “To quote George Bush” or “As Pericles put it … ”).
