Vince Cable: David Cameron 'distancing' himself from BP

I'm loving this New Politics lark. All these new ministers who actually answer questions and generally talk about stuff, sometimes remarkably candidly.

Today's prize for frankness goes to Vince Cable. He was speaking at Cass Business School today, then took 20 minutes to answer questions from us horrible hacks about businessy stuff. This is a Good Thing. Ministers should surely be confident enough to field a few questions from the Fourth Estate about their jobs, instead of hiding behind press officers as was often the case in an earlier age.

Anyway, one of the things the Business Secretary was asked about was BP. Is there anything HMG should be doing about the travails of one of the UK's biggest companies? Apparently not.

Dr Cable said:

"Clearly it's a massive phenomenon. It's having major indirect effects on the UK economy, because BP is a major component of the FTSE.

"It's not terribly clear that Government has a role here.

And then he said this:

"I think David Cameron was sensible in distancing himself from it."

Hmm. I see what he's getting at, and Mr Cameron has hardly been keen to embrace BP of late. But I wonder if it's the best thing for the Business Secretary to be suggesting that the Prime Minister is "distancing himself" from a major British company.