ALARM IN THE FG RANKS AS LEO IS BESTED BY FF RUSTICS

THIS has all been enormously damaging to Leo Varadkar, who allowed it become a cluster-blunder for the Fine Gael party.

Leo the Magnificent has been comprehensively bested by a misjudged Micheál, the Grand Old Duke of Cork.

And that’s got to hurt, especially when a key part of Fine Gael DNA is the innate conviction of superiority over everyone else.

The departed Tánaiste certainly had that chromosome, haughtily refusing to consider her position until already tumbling from the plank of political pragmatism.

If Leo had carried out his wild undergraduate threat to go to the country, Ms Fitzgerald would have been effectively telling the voters, on every doorstep through her very presence, that she mattered more than they.

So much for being always determined to vindicate a single citizen – when it is arguable the Tánaiste and Taoiseach who were prepared to treat three million of those same citizens as mere pawns in their game.

Meanwhile, their Party of Law and Order was reduced to presiding over an apparent defence of deeply Machiavellian practice at the Department of Justice, operating in sinister cahoots with malign Garda management.

Not a very ‘distinguished’ political performance.

Leo has lost badly and, not only shaken the confidence of the people in their shiny new Taoiseach, but he has also deeply alarmed his own rank and file, while handing the political upper hand to Fianna Fáil.

He has, at least, promised a programme of stern and swift reform. Yet there were reports that Fine Gael’s posher party folk were deeply reluctant to go out over Christmas, unlike the FF sansculottes and those rabid poleshinners of republicanism.

Meanwhile it was sad to see Simon Coveney, fretful and unshaven, engaged in high-pitched late night pleading on the Claire Byrne Show. His was the Blueshirts’ very own version of the tearful Gerry Collins with his emotional plea to Albert Reynolds not to ‘burst’ open the party. Coveney was to be pitied, which will irk him all the more.

Having handsomely won the membership vote in the Fine Gael leadership contest, he will feel that he should have been tánaiste thereafter, not Frances.

Apart from tender egos, huge dents have been inflicted on the Fine Gael brand. In the old days of Garret versus Charlie, the voters had a choice of honest incompetence or dishonest competence.

The new FG has just flirted with the worst of both worlds through the brief offering of possibly dishonest incompetence.

It was never about legal advice or punting a problem off to faraway tribunal land. It was always about the Government’s knowledge, the State’s probable collusion in dirty tricks, and the small matter of political accountability.

If not the Dáil, there was always the final arbiter of accountability, the people. But the obvious reality, made concrete through a rolling head yesterday, was that if Leo’s angry, insulted bluff didn’t intimidate the rustics of Fianna Fáil, it was never going work with an irate and inconvenienced electorate. And so Ms Fitzgerald, a very reluctant Santa, finally picked up her sack and delivered the cherished goods of an avoided election. Are we supposed to be grateful?

Meanwhile, Leo has single-handedly managed to cut short his own Government by about a year.

There will inescapably be an election in the spring.

AND instead of the New Man with his exciting, refreshing brand of youthful vigour, knocking the dull socks off everyone else to deliver a resounding victory, it is possible Fine Gael may not even be the largest party when those votes are counted.

Five years in opposition, with a clutch of familiar faces missing, would be like a jail sentence to Leo. The glitz and glamour would immediately vanish and the sheer hard work would have to begin.

Hubris might have got him to where he is now, but he would suddenly have to be looking regularly over his shoulder.

The last time a tánaiste resigned in similar circumstances, Brian Lenihan Sr in 1990, we soon saw the end of Charlie Haughey’s political career. Then, the accusation was that the taoiseach acted too hastily; this time it is that he waited too long.

But for now Leinster House simply joins the general public in breathing out one long, low sigh of relief.