Personal Life
Cable's first wife was Olympia Rebelo, a Goan Roman Catholic, whom he met "in the unromantic setting of a York mental hospital where we happened to be working as nurses during a summer vacation." He courted her while working in Kenya as a treasury finance officer and despite the concerns of both their fathers, they married in Nairobi's Catholic Cathedral in 1968. They had three children together and she completed her PhD at Glasgow University in 1976. Olympia Cable was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the 1987 general election. After apparently successful treatment the disease returned in the mid 1990s and by the 1997 election Cable was juggling his senior post at Shell with being his wife's carer. Olympia Cable died shortly after the 2001 election.
In 2004, he married second Rachel Wenban Smith. When appearing on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs programme in January 2009, Cable revealed that he wears the wedding rings from both of his marriages.
A keen ballroom dancer, Cable long expressed his desire to appear on the BBC's hit TV show Strictly Come Dancing; he appeared on the Christmas 2010 edition of the show, partnered by Erin Boag and dancing the Foxtrot. He performed well and scored 36/40 from the judges, including a mark of 10/10 from head judge Len Goodman. Cable was the second politician to appear on the show, after Ann Widdecombe.
Cable is a Patron of the Polycystic Kidney Disease Charity (PKD) and is also a Patron of the Changez Charity.
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