After I hung up the call, I knew the Taoiseach wanted out

LATE on a balmy July night last summer I had a long phone conversation with a senior Government figure who is close to Leo Varadkar, and by the end of it I knew that the Taoiseach wanted out.

What I couldn’t figure out was how he would do it. As a veteran political journalist I’m institutionalised. I was judging Leo Varadkar on the standards of all the other taoisigh I’d observed, who had been dragged humiliatingly from office.

Yesterday he left in a breathtakingly ruthless fashion. Less than three months before pivotal local and European elections, in a year that was predicted to see a general election, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar walked out and left Fine Gael to carry on without the man who has dominated the party for the last number of years.

Last July, I had been due to appear on a late night TV show and had contacted this always consummately briefed Government figure to ask them about a matter. That person had missed the call and got back to me after 11pm as I crossed the M50 bridge from north to south Dublin. We spoke into the early hours.

That source told me that Leo Varadkar really wanted to stay in the job of Taoiseach. I hadn’t asked whether he did or not, and this apparently positive statement made me alert to the negative: he didn’t want it. The conversation went on, Leo knew there was so much more to life than politics, that there were so many places he would like to see as a relatively anonymous person, free from a public who now videoed his every move.

Leo pined for the United States, the source said, where he could move around unfettered. Most think such recognition is what politics is all about. Yet politics, when you pare away all the trappings, is about numbers, those we on the outside know about and those only the leader of a party and their key aides know.

Fine Gael, in Varadkar’s only outing as leader, in the 2020 General Election, took just 20.9% of the vote. It was only 4.7% less than Enda Kenny’s last election, 2016, but Fine Gael fell from 50 seats to a disastrous 35. Varadkar had ousted Kenny on the promise to TDs that he would keep their seats and add more. He didn’t. Since then Fine Gael has fallen further to around 19% in opinion polls.

The party were expecting a very bad local and European elections in June. And if Varadkar had led them into a general election this year there would have been another Fine Gael bloodbath.

Ten Fine Gael TDs have said they will not stand in the next general election, we expect that Varadkar won’t stand, so make that 11. The Fianna Fáil exodus of 2011 saw 31% of their sitting TDs retire, Varadkar’s announcement means Fine Gael now exceeds that record. Can there be a greater no-confidence gesture in a leader?

Fine Gael would have been lucky to hold five of those seats. What these departures also indicate is that there is detailed private polling that only the leader and a select few know about.

THE details might not be shared but people get the message. And, of course, TDs and senators can sense what’s going on on the ground. They tell me things are very, very bad for Fine Gael and Varadkar knew it.

A Fianna Fáil apparatchik told me about a meeting with then-Taoiseach Brian Cowen in his office in early 2011, in the dying days of his government. This aide showed him ‘the poll figures’. These, the aide explained, ‘are the figures and data that we only show to the leader, and they don’t lie’.

The man told me that as Cowen leafed through the paperwork the aide could see how the impending catastrophe now began to overwhelm the Taoiseach.

Cowen, whose grandfather had been a founding member of Fianna Fáil, whose family and community were steeped in the party, was overcome.

So many jobs were about to be lost, so many reputations destroyed. And this was on top of the greater catastrophe that was engulfing the nation then.

Yet Cowen fought on, until the Green Party threatened to walk out of government unless he was removed.

Bertie Ahern was a successful Taoiseach but then there were 18 months of extraordinary financial revelations and humiliating tribunal appearances and still he had to wait until impending government collapse before being forced out.

Again, in 2017 we joked in Leinster House about the number of important international events Enda Kenny was finding as an excuse to stay in office as the inevitable accession of Leo Varadkar loomed. He too stayed too long.

I had, wrongly, believed, last July, that Varadkar was trapped because I had been guided by what had gone before, by the rules that governed Irish politics before Varadkar.

Taoisigh usually stay around and endure the defeats and humiliation because that is what their parties, their supporters and the public expect.

Leo Varadkar has, at the last, done the unexpected and walked away.