FF right to be wary of Leo and his new spin machine as election starts to loom
NOBODY except the favoured few in his inner circle seems to know what Leo Varadkar is really up to these days – and those on the other side of the political divide are getting increasingly jumpy over what game he will be playing in the coming months.
He has, of course, been bedecked in well-cut expensive suits, hair coiffed to an even higher standard than usual, and there have been those multi-patterned socks. The socks got him right up there in the style stakes, when he met that poster boy for smooth politics Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
But Micheál Martin (right) and sundry Opposition heavyweights are not fooled by the polished, public persona of the Taoiseach. There is also a steel to Mr Varadkar as proven in the Fine Gael leadership battle. He outsmarted Simon Coveney, by way of ruthless behind-the-scenes planning, but most of all by superb political timing.
It’s the oldest adage in the political rule book – you’ve got to know when to make your move. Go too early and you will be cut off at the pass. Stall just a little too long and your enemies will have backed you into a corner. In the FG slugfest he got his timing just right. He resisted the temptation to move against Enda Kenny despite the outgoing Taoiseach’s long, slow exit; he tempered his attack on the Coveney camp doing just enough to carry off the top prize.
The fear in Fianna Fáil ranks in particular, is that this instinct for finely tuned political timing will leave them flat-footed in the coming months. After all, the general election countdown gathers pace by the day. Preparations for the next big jousting at the polls are well under way in FG, as reflected in the creation of its new, lofty-sounding Strategic Communications Unit.
The unit is rightly seen by the Opposition benches as a kind of heavy artillery being moved to the front line. Its primary objective will be to hustle floating and undecided voters to the Fine Gael fold. The hope is that “by explaining things better” increasing numbers from the so-called “coping classes” will defect from Fianna Fáil, in particular.
Fully aware of the Varadkar plan to try to outflank him in the battle for the centre ground vote, Mr Martin has been at pains to distance his party from the prospect of any kind of coalition with Sinn Féin. He knows full well a Varadkar strategy of lumping FF in with Gerry Adams and Co will scare off many middle-of-the-road voters. However, Mr Martin’s problem is that some of his TDs have no problem with such a coalition deal.
In any case if the numbers fall a certain way post-the election, the temptation will be acute to risk some sort of arrangement, on the grounds “the people have spoken”.
For his part Mr Varadkar has been assuring us his new Strategic Communications Unit is not a modernday spin machine, manned by public relations and marketing specialists, all for the glory of Fine Gael and its leader. But it does have some proven talent on board, most notably John Concannon. He has been involved in three extraordinarily successful marketing campaigns – The Gathering, the 1916 commemorations, and latterly the establishment of the Wild Atlantic Way as a hugely successful tourism concept.
If rebranding of a new-style Varadkar-led Fine Gael was to achieve a similar touchstone with the public, the party’s electoral fortunes would be transformed.
The official Fine Gael line is the unit is tasked with ensuring the Government’s “message is getting out there”. But while it will have to refrain from becoming overly political, because it has civil servants on board, it cannot but be in the spin business one way or another.
Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar does have a point, that a more concerted effort is required by those in power to try to balance the national debate on some of the key issues affecting the country. Whether it be housing, health, the Garda, Northern Ireland, or even St Patrick’s Day visits to the Trump White House, political discourse is all too often reduced to simplistic point-scoring.
Some of the broadcast media, in particular, are guilty of building too many programmes around a predictable group of overused naysayers. Their essential calling card is a capacity for endless point-scoring, mixed with a tendency towards emotional blackmail. They have little interest in focusing on any kind of reasonable solution, to recurring, and often highly complex problems.
In any case it’s not too surprising Mr Varadkar should be focusing on style as well as substance; so often it can mean the difference between achieving power and losing it. Ever since the arrival of television as a mass medium in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the ground rules for politics changed forever. Lessons were quickly learned on this side of the Atlantic following the 1960 presidential debates in the US.
On television John F Kennedy looked tanned, relaxed, confident, and even presidential. All because his advisers made sure he wore proper make-up before the TV cameras started rolling. On the other hand his opponent Richard Nixon, devoid of such cosmetic defences, looked pale, and almost ill, as he publicly sweated under the glare of the studio lights.
Given Kennedy eventually nicked the election by the slimmest of margins, it could be he became US president simply because he had timely advice on what was soon standard practice: wear some facial camouflage when appearing on the small screen.
In the decades that followed, there has been an array of high-profile spin doctors in both the UK and here, some of whom wielded remarkable power.
So we can now take it what might be termed the Leo Varadkar spin machine is in full swing. But we will have to wait for the BAS to get some real clues as to the message it will be touting. And what is the BAS? That, of course, is the mooted Big Autumn Speech. Then we might get a chink of light into the Varadkar battle plan – for what will be a dog-eat-dog general election campaign.