Vince Cable has become leader of the Lib Dems, and just 10 years after he should have taken his chance. Acting leader after the resignation of Menzies Campbell in 2007, he didn’t stand, leaving Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg to slug it out. The rest is disaster. The best that can be said about Clegg is that at least he wasn’t Huhne, who ended his political career in prison.

The funny thing is that Campbell’s resignation was in part prompted by suggestions that, at 67, he was “too old”. We will leave aside the obvious point, that the man hadn’t even reached the Britain’s new retirement age. Cable, the oldest party leader since Churchill, is not “too old” at 74. He’s just far, far too tardy.

Cable may, of course, have ushered in his very own disasters had he become Lib Dem leader a decade ago. Yet it’s hard to see how anyone could have damaged the Lib Dem party more than Clegg did, with his pathetic trust in that brace of amateur Machiavels David Cameron and George Osborne. Still, Cable is the only one of the politicians mentioned thus far to have survived the decade at all, which must count for something – though even he had no seat during the last parliament, punished for his own self-serving part in the awful coalition government.

The most ghastly aspect of all this is that the things the Lib Dems believed in most fervently have been destroyed by their own bad choices. In supporting Cameron so slavishly, the Lib Dems set in motion the chain of events that led to Britain’s rejection of an alternative voting system; to its dazed, drunken stagger out of the European Union; to a virtual collapse in social justice in Britain; and to a vice-like tightening of the two-party system they had for years been a credible alternative to.

The terrible irony is that the first-past-the-post voting system needs replacing more than ever. Favoured because it tends to produce “strong government”, it has actually produced a string of terrible governments in recent years, culminating in the zombie regime that pretends to be leading the country at present. Yet that’s the nature of the beast that is FPTP.

In Mexico, they have a not-very-PC toy called a “wife-leader”. It’s a narrow, woven cone on a string, and when someone accepts an invitation to put their finger in the cone, it tightens as they try to pull their finger away. That’s what FPTP is like: the more dysfunctional the governments it produces become, the more desperately people rally round one of the two main parties in an effort to stop the other one.

In the last election this tendency became painfully apparent, with neither of the main parties offering an alternative to Brexit, even though the neologism represents the most fundamental, complex and far-reaching set of political changes it’s possible to imagine Britain facing. Yet, if you wanted the Tories out, you had to vote Labour – even if you disagreed with its European policy.

Cable is the only leader offering a second referendum, after the terms of Brexit have been finalised. This, in my view, would be the right and democratic course. But the chances of a substantial proportion of the British electorate taking him up on this offer, thus risking a split in the anti-Tory vote, are negligible. Britain’s remainers have been not just forced to leave Europe, under terms we do not yet know because they do not yet exist: we have also been functionally disenfranchised in our own country. This, to gain “sovereignty”.

But what kind of sovereignty does Britain have when one man, Nigel Farage, was able to influence the political agenda so catastrophically without ever having sat in the UK parliament? FPTP did not protect parliament from the influence of a single-issue party – a party that would have exposed itself as reckless, had a more representative voting system bared just a few of its so-called high-flyers to the scrutiny that comes with a seat in parliament.

FPTP may have kept Ukip out. But the party’s “policies” have infected Britain all the same, even though it is now an unaccountable irrelevance. FPTP is supposed to halt this kind of pernicious infiltration also. But it did not.

The final paradox is that some of the banks whose profligate lending fuelled an unsustainable boom are now heading off to Frankfurt. Again, “strong government” was helpless when faced with the might of the banks. The Blair and Brown governments fell over themselves to keep the bankers sweet, bailed them out when it all blew up for everyone, and ushered in austerity.

In reality the twin issues that dominate British politics – Brexit and austerity – were brought about by government that proved puny in the face of rampant self-interest.

Right now, the country is in such a mess that little things such as the system under which we are governed seem like a luxury that can be set aside, perhaps to be taken up again when better times arrive. There are so many desperately urgent matters that the very infrastructure that delivers such abject governments has never, in practical terms, been more safely and securely embedded. Vince Cable and his 11 MPs are the absolute definition of the phrase too little, too late.