Before he got married again, Vince Cable was married to Olympia Rebelo for 33 years. She helped Mp in the early days of his career.
Sir John Vincent Cable was the leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2017 until 2019, when he quit.
He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Twickenham from 1997 to 2015 and from 2017 to 2019. In addition, he was a member of the Cabinet from 2010 to 2015, when he was Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, and Skills.
In the 1960s, the politician worked as an economic adviser for the Kenyan government. In the 1970s and 1980s, he did the same thing for the Commonwealth Secretariat. Cable went to Cambridge and Glasgow to learn about economics. He went to school at those places.
During the same time, he also taught economics at Glasgow University. After that, he worked as the Chief Economist for Shell in the 1990s. Cable was first a member of the Labour Party, and in the 1970s, he was a Labour councilor in Glasgow.
During this time, Vince was also John Smith’s special advisor. At the time, Smith was the Trade Secretary. On the other hand, in 1982 he changed sides and joined the brand-new Social Democratic Party, which later joined with the Liberal Party to become the Liberal Democrats.
Vince Cable comes from a political family that is on the right
Cable was born in York into a working-class family that identified as Conservative.
Both of his parents worked in the chocolate business. Len was a craftsman for Rowntree’s, and Edith worked for Terry’s packaging chocolates.
Cable has earned a Ph.D. in economics
Cable went to Nunthorpe Grammar School for his education, where he became the Head Boy.
After that, he went to Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge and got a degree in economics. At first, he had majored in natural sciences, but then he changed his mind. He was President of the Cambridge Union during the 1965-66 school year.
He also worked on the committee of the Cambridge University Liberal Club, where he eventually became President-elect. He left the Liberal Party, though, before he could become the club’s president.
Vince Cable joined the same groups as members of the Cambridge Mafia while he was a student at Cambridge University.
After he graduated from Cambridge University in 1966, Cable went to Kenya to work as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow, also called an ODI Nuffield Fellow. He took care of this.
He went to the University of Glasgow in 1973 to get his Ph.D. in economics from that school. His dissertation was about how economies are connected and how factories are built.
Cable started out in politics with the Liberal Party, but he later switched to the Labour Party
Cable was a member of the Liberal Party when he was in college. In 1966, he changed parties and joined the Labour Party.
In 1970, he ran for Labour and tried to replace Tam Galbraith as the Conservative MP for Glasgow Hillhead, but he didn’t win. Cable ran for election to the Corporation of Glasgow in the Partick West ward that same year, but he did not win.
He was elected to represent the Maryhill ward as a Labour councilor in 1971 and stayed in that position until 1974. In 1979, he ran for the Hampstead seat for the Labour Party but lost to Ken Livingstone, who also didn’t win the seat.
Vince Cable was an Aa Member while he was in Parliament
On his second try, at the 1997 general election, Cable beat Toby Jessel, the Conservative MP who was already in office in the Twickenham constituency. As a result, he was elected to the House of Commons.
In the following elections, in 2001 and 2005, he was able to increase his majority, and in 2010, he did even better. In 2015, he lost the election and lost his seat. However, in a special election in 2017, he won it back.
After the Orange Book came out, Cable was one of several Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament (MPs) who oversaw the party’s move toward economic liberalism and a more free market approach.
Some people thought that this change played a part in the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in 2010. This was one reason why the Orange Book was so controversial.
Late in 2005 or early in 2006, Vince Cable gave Charles Kennedy a letter that eleven of the twenty-three Liberal Democrat frontbenchers, including himself, had signed. In the letter, people said they didn’t trust Kennedy to lead the Liberal Democrats.
Cable was one of the people who signed it. On January 5, 2006, Charles Kennedy announced a leadership election in which he promised to run again. This was in response to criticism from his frontbench team and an ITN News story about his drinking.
Vince did this because he thought that if he did, he would be able to keep his job. Even so, on January 7, he turned in his resignation. Cable did not run for the party’s leadership. Instead, he helped Menzies Campbell win the election.
In 2019, Vince Cable quit being a politician and went into retirement
In May 2019, during the election for the European Parliament, Cable led the Liberal Democrats to their best national showing since the 2010 election.
The Liberal Democrats picked up fifteen seats. During the campaign, the party pushed for keeping things the same and was against Brexit. After that, he said he wanted to leave politics for good, and he stepped down as leader of the party on July 22, 2019, after Jo Swinson was chosen as the new leader.
He also gave up his seat in Parliament before the 2019 general election.
How Vince Fit into the European Movement
On July 2, 2022, it was made public that Cable had been named Vice President of the European Movement.
Olympia Rebelo, Vince Cable’s first wife, died of breast cancer
Cable’s first wife was Olympia Rebelo, a Kenyan who grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Goa.
Cable says that they first met “in the unromantic setting of a York mental hospital,” where they were both working as nurses during the summer break. In 1976, she got her Ph.D. in history from Glasgow University. At that point, she had three children with him, so her family was complete.
In 1987, Olympia found out she had breast cancer right after the election was over. After a course of treatment that seemed to work, the illness came back in the middle of the 1990s, right before the general election in 1997. She died just a few short months after the 2001 presidential election.
The public servant who was no longer working married Rachel Wenban Smith
In 2004, he and Rachel Wenban Smith got married
Cable said in January 2009 that when he is on the Desert Island Discs show on BBC Radio 4 in the UK, he wears the wedding bands from both of his marriages.
Ballroom dancing is very important to Vince
Cable is a big fan of ballroom dancing, and he has said for a long time that he wants to be on the BBC show Strictly Come Dancing, which is very popular.
He finally appeared on the show in the Christmas 2010 episode. He and his partner, Erin Boag, danced the foxtrot. He did a good job, and the judges gave him a total score of 36/40. The top judge, Len Goodman, gave him a perfect score.
Ann Widdecombe, who used to be in Parliament and was a member of the Conservative Party, was the first elected official to ever appear on the show.
Community service is something that Cable’s grandson does.
Cable’s eldest grandson is a social activist and entrepreneur Ayrton Cable. His work to improve the safety of food and water has brought him a lot of attention.
What’s Vince Cable’s net worth?
Vince Cable is thought to have a net worth of about $3 million.
Sources say Vince makes between $300,000 and $700,000 a year, but not much else is known about him.
How I grew up and went to school
Cable was born in York to a family from the working class that supported the Conservative Party. Len, his father, worked as a craftsman for Rowntree’s, and Edith, his mother, worked for Terry’s packing chocolates. Cable went to Nunthorpe Grammar School and became the Head Boy there. He then went to Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences at first and then switched to Economics. In 1965, he was President of the Cambridge Union. He was also on the committee and later elected President of the Cambridge University Liberal Club, but he quit the Liberal Party before becoming President. He went to Cambridge at the same time as the Cambridge Mafia.
After finishing his studies at the University of Cambridge in 1966, Cable was sent to Kenya as an Overseas Development Institute Nuffield Fellow.
In 1973, he got his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Glasgow. His research was on how economies become more integrated and industrialized.
Economics career
Cable taught at the University of Glasgow for a while and was a visiting research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics from 1999 to 2004. In 2016, the University of Nottingham made Cable an Honorary Professor of Economics.
From 1966 to 1968, he worked for the Kenyan Government as a Treasury Finance Officer. In 1969, he went to Central America to learn more about the Central American Common Market, which had just been set up.
From the beginning to the middle of the 1970s, Hugh Carless put Cable in charge of the Latin American branch of the Foreign Office as First Secretary. During this time, he went on a CBI trade mission to South America and worked on commercial diplomacy for six months. In the late 1970s, when John Smith was Trade Secretary, he was a special adviser to him. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a consultant for the UK government and then for Shridath “Sonny” Ramphal, who was Secretary-General of the Commonwealth.