Calm down dear, it's just a conference speech.

Does anyone else feel as though the reaction to Vince Cable’s speech has been exaggerated?

Yes, he uses some hostile rhetoric – words like “spivs and gamblers”, “murky” and “rigged”. But they are just words.

Most of the outraged voices seem to assume these words will eventually translate into policy which is overtly hostile to capitalism.

But if you actually read the speech on paper, without having to hear a hall of Lib Dems clap at the sabre-rattling rhetoric, there is little in there to suggest Cable is going to implement heaps of policy which is massively damaging to big business or capitalism.

In fact he talks about helping business by prizing more credit out of banks, and even then not by force, but by “carrot and stick”.

That’s something that all three parties have wanted to do.

People who got all uppity about the “capitalism kills competition” line, didn’t seem so bothered when Cable said the more anodyne “competition is central to my pro-market, pro-business, agenda.”

In his piece for the Telegraph website Mark Littlewood got all hot under the collar and said he couldn’t understand why Downing Street had approved the speech.

It was approved – indeed the PM’s office said it was “relaxed” over the text – because there is nothing controversial in its substance, only in its rhetoric.

That Cable gave an uncontroversial speech that fooled some into thinking it was radical, however, does show he is still a canny operator.

Cameron's mind wanders

David Cameron made a little Freudian slip while briefing us hacks yesterday.

He was talking about the Lib Dems' spending plans and referred to Boris Johnson’s sound-bite that Vince Cable was about as convincing as Monty Python’s killer rabbit – a reference to the fluffy killer bunny in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But getting a little distracted, instead of saying killer rabbit, Cameron said “rampant rabbit”.

He called Vince Cable a rampant rabbit!

I’m sure I don’t have to explain to the worldly readers of this blog what a rampant rabbit is. Suffice to say it is an altogether different kind of animal.

Lib Dem crime pledge a bit iffy

I suspected for a moment that Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne (pictured) might be forming some sort of crime-fighting duo.

A yellow Batman and Robin perhaps, or even a Lib Dem Cagney and Lacey.

The thing is they’d promised to solve an extra 82,000 crimes a year if elected, and I couldn’t work out how they could do that without getting on the front line.

It turns out their figure is a rather dubious one worked out from their pledge to get an extra 10,000 bobbies on the beat. Their thinking being:

10,000 extra officers X the average no of crimes solved by each UK bobby = 82,265 extra crimes solved in England and Wales.

The idea that an injection of cash from Westminster would definitely translate into crimes solved has to be ridiculous – there are just so many different factors at play.

I’m pretty sure, for example, that even the Lib Dem’s powers of persuasion wouldn’t be able to win over criminals into playing along.

And there’s more – the pledge to provide the extra bobbies will apparently be paid for through scrapping ID cards, says Lib Dem HQ.

Isn’t that the same cash that the party’s treasury spokesman Vince Cable has already earmarked to help pay off UK debt?

Yes, say party HQ – but actually they’re expecting the ID card scheme to yield more savings than the Government is admitting and so it might be able to cover the police scheme and pay off debt.

Hardly a solid foundation for major parts of finance and home affairs policy.

Clarke calls Cooper's bluff

While we're on the subject of the Rushcliffe MP here is his little spat with Yvette Cooper which was on Channel 4 news.

Cable is Ferengi

Vince Cable – who is beginning to resemble a Ferengi from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – was wheeled on to Marr this morning to talk on financial regulation.

The third party’s treasury spokesman seemed comfortable even when he said the Lib Dems would shrink the state and reduce public spending.

I guess it’s the advantage of knowing he won’t win that allows Cable to be honest.

The difference with the (rather contrived)Tory line on public spending – that there won’t be a decrease, only a reduction of the increase – is marked.

The public purse simply isn't weighty enough for big spending plans in the future.

UPDATE: David Cameron uses similar language in an interview to be published in Total Politics this Wednesday.

"We are going to be facing a situation where we are already borrowing eight per cent of our GDP.

"If the economic forecasts change at the budget it could be a lot more than that. It won’t be possible to do all the things we want to do."

Only the PM clinging on to public spending now.