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Just beyond Vince Cable's garden in Twickenham there is an apiary. "I was invited to open it and, as a result, I found from beekeepers that there was a terrible problem with bee diseases." Such is the glamour gap in modern British politics: the Conservative shadow chancellor is invited to a Russian billionaire's yacht off Corfu; his Lib Dem counterpart is asked to open beehives in south-west London. Beekeeping has since become one of the Lib Dem deputy leader's interests, joining ballroom dancing, which he learned from his first wife, and horse riding, which he learned from his second. His second wife, incidentally, is one of those people who could suffer a fatal anaphylactic shock unless treated immediately following a bee sting - which must make family afternoons in the garden oddly exciting.
But that isn't the point. Cable's point, rather, is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, poor deluded saps, didn't understand beeconomics. "I asked parliamentary questions about bees, first of Blair, then of Brown and they ridiculed me, saying that I wanted to spend thousands of pounds of research on bees and how this was typical of Lib Dems wanting to spend money on stupid things. I now realise their ridicule was based on incomprehension."
There's a book on the table of Cable's office in Portcullis House. It's called A World Without Bees (it is written by the Guardian's Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum) and features this terrifying passage: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Didn't Labour realise that bees are probably the most economically useful creatures on earth? That apples, pears, cherries - not to mention runner beans - flourish thanks to the efforts of these unpaid workers? That billions of pounds of taxpayers' money was being wastefully poured into subsidising intensive agriculture that kills bees, but that a few thousand pounds spent on research into the mystery bee-killer disease could save millions?
"Then it became clear that it was a big issue and that bees are very important to agriculture due to cross-pollination." Cable shakes his head sadly, as if he were still an economics lecturer and Brown and Blair were underprepared undergraduates.
It's the kind of story that Cable loves - one that ends with him implying, rather than ever vulgarly stating, that he told us so. But would anyone listen to him? Of course, not. He tells the same story about the recession. "Unlike the Tories who just didn't see this coming and have had no convincing response, we've seen this crisis building up - the bubble of the housing market, the over-extension of households in respect of debt."
And the government, too, he suggests, ill-advisedly treated him as a voice in the wilderness - before belatedly doing what he had recommended. Last year, for instance, he called for the nationalisation of Northern Rock months before Alistair Darling went ahead and did it. Cable subsequently quipped that when Goldman Sachs' bill for advice arrived in the chancellor's intray, he should have returned it saying he had received "rather higher quality advice free of charge" from the Lib Dems' Treasury spokesman.
"My team and I have been right on top of how the government should approach the problem of the banking system - first with Northern Rock and latterly with recapitalisation."
With the possible exception of Robert Peston, nobody in Britain is having a better recession than Vince Cable. He's the Citizens Advice Bureau parliamentarian of the year and the House magazine opposition politician of the year. In a parliament hardly noted for memorable phrase-making, he was the man who skewered Gordon Brown in the Commons thus: "The House has noticed the prime minister's remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean, creating chaos out of order rather than order out of chaos." He's the star of Newsnight's credit-crunch discussions, the go-to guy for a sagacious economics quote for broadsheets' front-page leads, the man whom Tory Alan Duncan described as "the holy grail of economic comment these days". He even has a Facebook appreciation society called Cable So Able.
Why then, I ask, haven't his critical raves been feeding into a poll surge for the Lib Dems? "Polls are volatile," he replies airily, "but I think at the end of the day we will get credit for it. In a way this is the economic equivalent of the Iraq war - at the early stages of the Iraq war we got very little credit for making the right call. But when the dust settled people realised that we'd said the right thing."
But isn't there a difference between saying the right thing and being in a position to act? Isn't he wasting his time in a politically impotent party at a time when he could be more of a darling as chancellor of the exchequer than the current incumbent? "I like to think that the Liberal Democrats are working towards government. I'm not a fan of being an opposition politician just for the sake of it. You do need to focus on getting into government and on what we'd do when we get there."
Isn't the truth of the matter, though, that he wielded the greatest political power aged 23 when he served as Treasury finance officer in Kenya? "That was purely fortuitous," says Cable of his Kenyan experience, which lasted from 1966 to 1968. "I arrived shortly after independence when many of the expatriates had left. To my embarrassment I had more of a say in the running of a country than I should have done. I was one of these bright young Cambridge graduates who had perhaps too high an opinion of myself. It was a fantastic experience - whether it was any good for the Kenyans I don't know."
In Kenya, Cable met his first wife, Olympia Rebelo, a Kenyan Asian of Goanese origin who was not only the mother of his three children (Paul and Aida, who are in their 30s, and Hugo, who is in his early 20s) but instilled in him a still-burning passion for dancing. (It says much about politics in the internet age that many more thousands have watched YouTube footage of him dancing with Strictly Come Dancing star Alesha Dixon than have watched his analysis of the perils of Britain's personal debt burden on the same site.)
It's worth noting that Cable doesn't deny the suggestion that he achieved his greatest political power early on. Since Kenya, he has served as special adviser to Jim Callaghan's trade secretary John Smith, as a councillor in Glasgow, chief economist at Shell, a university economics lecturer and, since 1997, as Twickenham's MP. In the early 80s he got so exasperated with Labour that he joined the SDP, a move that may have been principled but proved calamitous in terms of the greasy pole, serving to distance him further from government. Now he is deputy leader of a party whose hopes of wielding Westminster power in Cable's lifetime are surely fanciful. Is he not ambitious for more? "I want to influence the debates - I'm very ambitious in that sense and I'm very ambitious for my party to do well."
Cable is fond of quoting one of the earliest economics texts ever written, Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. "The author had noticed that, in nature, not every creature is programmed simply to fight for survival," Cable wrote recently. "Some, notably bees, also unselfishly perform a public service from which others benefit." True, those of a chillier temper (eg Richard Dawkins) deny this and many contend that Mandeville was actually arguing that vices such as luxury, greed and envy catalyse public benefits by encouraging enterprise, but no matter: Vince Cable takes the moral he wants, seeing virtue in being selflessly bee-like.
"I am ambitious but not necessarily for holding jobs. It doesn't worry me that I don't have some fancy title." Not even the fancy title of leader of the Lib Dems? "There were circumstances where I would have gone for it. When my colleagues reflected on the very brutal way Ming Campbell was dealt with because of his age - there were some venomous cartoons, for example, depicting a fit, active 65-year-old with a Zimmer frame - I think some of my colleagues thought age was an issue and I was not encouraged to stand." Cable is fit, active and 65, but these are contemptibly ageist times.
Instead, plausible, 41-year-old Nick Clegg became leader, with Cable - after an illustrious period as acting leader - his deputy. Some have suggested that, while Clegg is the frontman, Cable is the backroom brains of the operation. Unsurprisingly, Cable doesn't buy this. "He's very firmly the leader of the party and I have a supporting role. I'm not hoping to usurp that in any way. There's growing recognition that he'll be an effective leader in the next general election." I'm not the first journalist to detect that when Cable praises his boss he often does so in the future tense.
Here's a no-win question - would he rather win Strictly Come Dancing or be the Lib Dem leader? "I haven't had an offer to be the latter and I haven't been invited to pursue the former," parries Cable. "The serious point is that I do enjoy my dancing and I go once, perhaps twice, a week with a very good coach. It's a very good hobby and takes my mind off more pressing political things. It keeps you physically fit. Last week I did an exam and got some honours in some rather elevated grade. So it's something I love doing and it's a hobby I can pursue with my wife." Cable is too modest: subsequent inquiries reveal that the exam he passed is called the international supreme award two in ballroom. International! Supreme! Alistair Darling and George Osborne must look on such mighty achievements and despair.
It's surprising Cable has time for such sidelines. "I work incredibly hard actually, because I realise I'm part of what are a historically important series of events. I work very hard in parliament to ask more questions than a great majority of MPs. Despite the fact that many of the powers of parliament have leached away and it's actually quite difficult to change the legislation, it is possible through good questioning and the use of things like adjournment debates, to steer the public debate." Last week he posed parliamentary questions on special-needs education, planning regulations affecting gardens, railway services out of Waterloo and the future of the Ascension Islands.
Why does he bother so much with parliament? After all, many of his fellow MPs don't. "Having been elected to parliament at the age of 54, having done a variety of other careers, I was perhaps more touched merely by being a member of parliament because it's a very important job and much undervalued. I've never seen it as a route to something else. It's intrinsically important." Cable the selfless bee once more, doing his public duty. Or at least affecting to be.
Cable's first wife died in 2001 after having breast cancer for 14 years. How did that affect his professional life? "The last four [years] were very difficult. For the last two she was at home and I was caring for her. So in that first parliament, at a personal level, I was sort of hanging on. So my first priority was to help her and my other priority was to be a good local MP in Twickenham so I didn't really have time to devote to building a national profile at all. When she died, one of the ways I dealt with the situation personally was plunging totally into my political career, as a way of losing myself I suppose."
In 2004, he remarried: his second wife, divorced farmer Rachel Smith, clashed with him over his defence of free trade at a New Forest meeting of Lib Dems. The erotics of Lib Dem economic debate is a topic insufficiently explored.
Charles Kennedy, then Lib Dem leader, made him Treasury spokesman in 2003, and Cable praises him for his political courage in leading the party to oppose the Iraq war in the same year: "It was very, very bitter. The local Tories were organising victory marches through Twickenham and we were accused of being cowards and anti-military, which was completely untrue. I think Charles Kennedy deserves a lot of credit for his leadership at that stage."
And yet Cable was one of the Lib Dems who hastened to depose Kennedy because of his drink problem. When did it become apparent that he wasn't the right person to lead the party? "The problem started to emerge after the 2005 election and later it became unmanageable." What did he learn from how Kennedy and Campbell were treated as they left the political limelight? "One of the features of political life is when you're up you're up and when you're down you're down. It's pretty uncompromising and for the past year I've been up but I don't assume I'll be there for ever."
But for the time being he is. And because he forecasts that the recession will be deep and long, we can expect Vince Cable will remain the much-sought holy grail of economic comment for a good while yet. "I would love to believe this was going to be a short and shallow recession but in all honesty I don't think that's likely. The shock of the financial crisis has been absolutely massive. There is no sign yet that the banks are restoring lending. The British housing market was more overvalued than any in the western world, with the possible exception of Ireland's. There's an enormous stock of personal debt in relation to people's earnings, which is now going to have to be replaced by a build up of personal savings. All of those things mitigate against an early recovery."
Any good news? "Unemployment is cushioned by immigrant labour from eastern Europe. And there is less of a manufacturing industry from which to lose jobs."
What about this buildup of savings that Cable sees as fundamental to recovery - how on earth is that going to happen in this buy-now-pay-sometime-never culture? Cable suggests it's already happening as fearful Britons re-prioritise. The problem, he argues, is that the impulse to save is effectively discouraged. "At the moment, people who want to save for their pensions are hit by very high marginal rates of tax and the whole system of pension credit makes that problem worse. One reason I argue for a decent basic state pension linked to earnings is not simply to be nice to pensioners but to provide an incentive for people to save for themselves - if they're totally reliant on state benefits there's little incentive. Many people have been very badly scarred by bad experiences of misselling - we have had very bad episodes such as Equitable Life where people have tried to save money and have been ripped off."
What can be done? Cable has known the answer for years. "If people had access to genuine independent advice they would be much more confident about making sensible investments. I had a debate in parliament almost 10 years ago with Ruth Kelly when she was the most junior minister in the Treasury and I said then that something needed to be done to make that happen. The government just dragged its feet and did nothing."
Typical. If only they had listened. But they didn't, and just look what happened. Personal debt rose exponentially, savers got ripped off and we wound up in a terrible position to face down a recession. Cable wouldn't be so vulgar or vainglorious as to say, "I told you so." But he certainly wouldn't mind if you realised that he knew what had gone wrong long before his political opponents.
• Audio: Listen to Vince Cable talking to Stuart Jeffries guardian.co.uk/politics
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