If Dr Cable is reading things right, tough times will soon get far tougher than we have imagined
The business secretary cuts an unlikely Churchill. Vince Cable's sparse language in his Guardian interview about Britain having to adjust from being a "price-setter" to a "price-taker" is a world away from the old bulldog's grandiloquent offer of blood, toil, tears and sweat. But there is a parallel in their political purpose: to tell the grim truth as they see it.
If Dr Cable is reading things right, and he makes a strong case, tough times will soon get far tougher than we have imagined – due not merely to cuts, but also to sterling's collapse and an economic model whose bankruptcy is rendering us "a poorer country". His message is that even if growth picks up, and this week's employment and retail sales figures were encouraging, the squeeze on living standards will endure for years.
The most immediate question is how Dr Cable's coalition colleagues will respond. The last time the Panglossian code of politics was so flagrantly breached was back in 2008, and also in a weekend Guardian interview: chancellor Alistair Darling spoke bluntly of the worst financial crisis in 60 years. The prime minister of the time was Browned off, and little good it did him: it was Mr Darling's independent stature that was enhanced. The prime minister of today will be relieved that his business secretary has not outright contradicted him, but may be peeved that his most turbulent minister is now taking such a different tone from the official, oft-repeated line about edging out of the danger zone. At a time when the coalition is already creaking over health, crime and policing, Dr Cable's intervention raises the question of what exactly the government is going to do to help families facing the prolonged pinch.
If Mr Cameron is smart, however, he will not be panicked into a row. Defending the parsimonious future in prospect is uncomfortable, to be sure, but the real question about the awkward twists in politics is whether they are more awkward for the other side. Each of the great retrenchments of the 20th century damaged the left more than the right. The Geddes Axe of 1922, the cutbacks after the 1967 devaluation and the cap-in-hand approach to the IMF in 1976: each of these was followed by a Conservative victory. More poignantly still, cutbacks in the Depression broke a Labour government and cemented a centre-right coalition in power.
While it has been adjusting to opposition, Labour has contented itself with economic fuzz. It has argued, with good reason, that coalition cuts are too thick and too fast, but has used this qualified general criticism against all manner of specific cuts – even though Labour's own financial plans implied rolling the state back a long way. Glance back at Mr Cameron's claim during last year's campaign that any minister proposing cuts that would actually hurt would be packed off back to their department and told to think again, and you can see the electoral attraction of peddling false hope.
The optimistic note Ed Miliband strikes on our comment pages could hardly be more different from Dr Cable's, and at first blush his suggestion that with Labour long-neglected fields such as housing could somehow now be tackled might seem of a piece with the prime minister's easy pre-election talk. In fact, there is a little more subtlety in the thinking – a recognition that a cash-strapped government will need to concentrate on quality-of-life promises that "look beyond the bottom line", a recognition, too, that the rich will have to shoulder new responsibilities, and a hope that more proactive industrial policies will be able to fix the economy, and through that to shrink the deficit. If Mr Miliband can develop this final thought into something more credible than a hunch, then he can plausibly go to the electorate wearing something more comfortable than Dr Cable's hair shirt. As Labour ought to be painfully aware, however, the hard intellectual spadework required has barely begun.