 So, Vince Cable says he plans to tackle what he calls an irrational cult of youth as he makes his bid to become leader of Liberal Democrats. The 74-year-old has told the Times that his age and experience are an asset, adding that the current sober mood in the country means now is the time for an older leader. So, is the age of a political leader important? Joining us to discuss this, the Navara media blogger and senior editor Ash Sakhar and also John Rental, chief political commentator at The Independent. Ash, to you first. Is there an irrational cult of youth? I mean, speaking as an irrational youth here, it seems to me that Vince Cable is really shadow boxing, both Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and also other kind of left-wing political figures like Bernie Sanders and Melanchon. They all qualify for a bus pass, but their support, especially Jeremy Corbyn, skews very young. So, I don't really see a problem here. But he's responding to the fact that a lot of people have raised eyebrows at the thought of somebody 74 starting to lead a political party when we have seen a real surge in young voters, a real surge of people supporting Jeremy Corbyn who is indeed older. Do you not see where he's coming from, that he feels that people are going to regard him as too old? I think he's already making excuses for the fact that the Lib Dems are polling so low. It's not about his age. It's the fact that their ideas themselves are not fresh. He's got a lot of experience, but it's bad experience. People remember the Lib Dems for yellow-bellied capitulation to the Tory's austerity agenda. They remember them for a failed electoral reform referendum, and they remember them for betraying the student vote that got them into power in the first place. John Rental, is he making excuses or is age really important? Well, let's be blunt about this. He is making the point that some people in the Liberal Democrats feel still rather bruised by the fact that Ming Campbell was pushed out of the leadership of the party allegedly for being too old, and he was younger than Vince Cable is now. Ash is quite right. Where is this cult of youth? We used to have Tony Blair, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. They all came to power in their early 40s, but today's generation of politicians are much older than that. The paradox is that it was David Cameron and Nick Clegg who put up tuition fees, and it was David Cameron who absolutely refused to touch the benefits for pensioners that Theresa May, aged 59, put in her manifesto to try to redress the balance between the generations perhaps, and we saw how that worked out. We have Macron though, don't we Ash in France, a young leader who's energised the country? You say that, but in terms of the protests that followed Macron's victory, those are often led by the very young, because just because people are young doesn't mean that they've got long-term political thinking. The thing that young people in France are very concerned about is that Macron's neoliberal agenda, one that would result in potentially hundreds of thousands of redundancies in the public sector, would strengthen a Le Pen candidacy in 2022. So I think that framing these issues as simply a matter of generational divides or demographics misses the real ideological divisions that exist in our society and the fact that economic shifts have been affecting different people at different times. So what we see are class dynamics played out along generational lines. So you think age is totally irrelevant? I don't think it's totally irrelevant, but I think that it is an incorrect framing of the situation that we find ourselves in. So young people have been disproportionately affected by increases in rents for instance, right? But that's been a bit of a slow burn and it's been exacerbated by things like right to buy, it's been exacerbated by the presence of speculative capital in the property markets. So it doesn't just affect young people, but it disproportionately affects young people. To place it within a framework of purely age, I think misses the point that real structural economic changes are needed and that they're going to benefit everyone in the long run. John Rental, do you think Vince Cable can spin his age as something actually really positive for the young? This is somebody who's got a strong economic head on his shoulders, he's lived through periods of boom and bust. He perhaps, dare I say it, knows more than them. Well yeah, you have to dare to say things like that these days. I mean I think actually right though that the age of the politician isn't necessarily relevant, it's what policies they propose. But I do disagree with her, I do think there are intergenerational issues or fairness between the distribution of resources between pensioners and students for example, which are real problems that need to be tackled and I think the age of the person who is promising to tackle them is irrelevant. And I think Vince Cable is a very clever and able politician. I think the student vote will hate him for what he did on tuition fees in the coalition government, but that was because of his policies, not because of his age. I mean Ash, isn't experience though a really useful thing? Whether or not you agree with the person, they've lived through a lot of stuff that you haven't lived through. They've experienced a lot of stuff, they have life experience that younger people can only hope to have. Isn't it worth considering that fundamentally? I mean you call it experience, I call it assessing someone on their political and policy record. So the amount of time someone has spent making bad decisions if anything plays against them in my book. Again, this isn't dismissing Cable based on his age, it's dismissing him or at least critiquing him based on his history. I think that we've seen him at the helm of a failed austerity project, a failed ideology which is centrism which is kind of becoming less and less popular and what people want now is change. Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott and John McDonnell are three very experienced politicians but their ideological agenda, their worldview is very different and that's what people are looking towards. Those ideas are fresh and again it's got nothing to do with the kind of body that's expressing them. John, do you think that's right? Do you think that Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott are appealing to the youth because their ideas are fresh or just because they've got a fresher way of delivering them? No, because their ideas happen to meet the needs of the moment, I think that's much more the secret of their sex. You've got to change, you've got to be fluid, you've got to move with the times. No, but the old point about Jeremy Corbyn is he hasn't changed. The reason young people in particular like him is because they think he's genuine, he's principled, he sticks to his principles because he's always held to the same ideology. Throughout his political life he hasn't developed or learned at all so he's no advert for age as experience but then there's no fool like an old fool. My experience as the representative of the old people on this programme, my experience in politics hasn't made me any noticeably wiser. I like it. I think we're going to leave it there. It's a lovely point to stop it. John Rental and Ash Sucker, thank you both very much.