Going off-message

Vince Cable, with his usual charm, has let slip the real reasons why every student in the country will have to pay £9000 per year for a worse education than they currently receive:

Vince Cable has claimed that the government effectively was held to ransom on tuition fees, as a group of elite universities would have “gone private” if the cap had not been raised.

Speaking at a conference in Manchester yesterday, the business secretary added that he does not know whether the proposed cap of £9,000 a year will be enough to “head off” those considering opting out of state financial support.

“One of the reasons we are [raising the fee cap] is precisely to head off Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, University College London and a few others from going private,” he is reported to have said in a speech at the annual conference of the Girls’ Schools Association.

“If we had not opened up the system, they would have a very strong incentive to do so.”

Mr Cable is also reported to have told delegates at the conference that “a lot of universities are effectively broke” and that “if they were in the private sector they would have been filing for bankruptcy”.

“Various arrangements have been cobbled together to keep them going, and we can’t continue to do that,” he said.