So, why do you like Vince Cable?

Two findings jumped out at me from YouGov’s recent poll of Liberal Democrat members, parts of which Stephen Tall covered last week.

One is the similarity in many of the findings between YouGov’s poll and the Liberal Democrat Voice surveys of party members, a similarity which we’ve found before. That’s good news – and reassuring too, given how often the Lib Dem Voice surveys are now quoted by the media as being ‘what Lib Dems think’.

The other is that it means the YouGov poll mirrors both our own findings and my own experience talking to Lib Dem members in many different parties – and that is the popularity of Vince Cable. If you’ve been asleep or incommunicado for the last nine months you might wonder why I’d comment on Vince’s popularity – because after all, he’s Vince, isn’t he?

But in that intervening period there was the matter of tuition fees.

And it’s not as if that’s an issue that is over, done and forgotten.

Nor is it an issue that Vince was absent from. Far from it, he was at the centre of it in Parliament, in the media and in the party.

Yet the YouGov poll gave him a net +57% score on how well/badly members think he’s doing and the last Lib Dem Voice survey gave him a net +51% on how effective/ineffective members think he is.

It’s arguable that members could rate him as effective whilst still disagreeing with what he’s doing, but his score on that measure did plummet during the height of the tuition fees debates before then recovering – whilst of course YouGov’s wording is different.

Hence the question: why is Vince so popular with Liberal Democrat members?