CHANGE AT THE TOP ENTER HARRIS HAS BIG DECISIONS TO MAKE How party saviour appeared to lose interest

In a matter of months, Leo went from zero to hero, but in the end his heart clearly just wasn’t it it, reports Hugh O’Connell

Leo Varadkar was not interested in discussing his own legacy at his final EU summit in Brussels last week. “I feel sorry for the people who have to write that kind of rubbish on Sunday — and it’s a pity they get paid to do it, quite frankly, because it will all be rubbish,” he told journalists.

“Legacies of politicians aren’t assessed in the days after they step down, or the weekend after. It’s in three years’ time, or five years’ time, or 10 years’ time.”

If, in the outgoing Taoiseach’s assessment, legacy is a matter for another day, it is worth instead reflecting on how and why Varadkar, once viewed as his party’s saviour who would lead it to electoral nirvana, resigned last week, having concluded Fine Gael was better off without him. To do this, one must return to the months that followed one of his finest hours.

In October 2019, Varadkar hammered out the broad outline of what became the post-Brexit trading deal with then British prime minister Boris Johnson in Wirral. It was an event so significant that there was an immediate 15-point bounce in his approval rating, at a time when Fine Gael was at 29pc in the polls.

Although the clamour grew within the party for an election, Varadkar decided against it — a decision he is likely to now regret.

Two months later, the dark winds swirling around Fine Gael and the man set to succeed him, Simon Harris. Facing a motion of no confidence in his health minister, Varadkar called a snap election in mid-January after it became clear Harris would not survive a Dáil vote and the Government would fall anyway.

The campaign was miserable. No one cared for the Taoiseach’s Brexit exploits, and a toxic row over the pension age proved highly damaging.

Varadkar travelled the country, arriving in rural towns in the dark, cold evenings, wandering in and out of shops and pubs and encountering largely nonplussed voters.

The election result was one of the worst in Fine Gael’s history. Nearly all of the 35 TDs who were returned wanted out of government and the Taoiseach seemed genuinely energised by the possibility of rebuilding Fine Gael in opposition.

Then Covid-19 hit, and the country turned to its Taoiseach and the caretaker government.

To their credit, they were not found wanting in providing reassurance to a nation terrified by an unknown deadly virus that swept the world. Varadkar was in his element, addressing the nation on an almost weekly basis from the front of Government Buildings. When he spoke, people listened; they stayed home, as he asked, and pulled together to flatten the curve.

The political dividend was incredible. By mid-June 2020, Varadkar’s approval rating stood at 75pc — up an astonishing 45 points. The Government itself had an approval rating of 72pc, with Fine Gael itself polling at 37pc. As Shane Ross later observed in the book Pandemonium: “Varadkar was fighting for his political life, they said they were going into opposition, Covid arrives and it was manna from heaven for them: he suddenly becomes the statesman.”

But within a fortnight, Varadkar was gone from the Taoiseach’s office, relegated to Tánaiste by virtue of the historic deal with Fianna Fáil and the Greens. It was the first time in history that a former taoiseach found himself in a lower office of government — and it was compounded by the fact that never before had a taoiseach with such soaring approval ratings suddenly found themselves out of the office.

It’s no surprise Varadkar struggled. “Nobody’s ever done it before,” he later said in Pandemonium. “It wasn’t easy at first, going from number one in an organisation to number two in a three-party coalition, but that’s life.”

At one point, Eamon Ryan noticed Varadkar leaving a meeting in the Sycamore Room and turning right to go to his old office instead of left to his new one. As Tánaiste, he was prickly over Micheál Martin’s tendency to be late for meetings, and in August 2020 he blew up over a poorly drafted memo on new Covid restrictions.

“If you keep doing business like this, we won’t be doing business much longer,” he told a cabinet meeting.

Although relations in the Government improved, Varadkar grew more sceptical about lockdowns, and in October he had a much-publicised falling out with chief medical officer Tony Holohan and Nphet, which soured relations with the Coalition’s public health advisers.

Later that month, revelations that he had leaked a confidential governbegan ment document about a new GP contract to a friend when he was Taoiseach sparked a full-blown political crisis, though he survived a Dáil motion of no confidence.

The matter became the subject of a garda criminal investigation that hung over him for the following 18 months. He was deeply affected by it.

In summer 2022, the DPP decided he would face no criminal prosecution, clearing the path for his election as Taoiseach that December.

However, his return to the top job did not bring the bounce he and Fine Gael had hoped for. Colleagues felt Varadkar’s heart wasn’t in it; that he was struggling, almost uninterested. He would dispute this, but that’s what his own colleagues believed.

By last summer, the Sunday Independent and others were reporting on growing discontent within Fine Gael about his leadership and a view that a bad local and European elections in 12 months’ time could be fatal.

Varadkar got the message, addressed his critics in the days that followed and appeared somewhat reinvigorated when the political season kicked off again last September.

Clearly, it was not enough — and, as he revealed last week, by Christmas he had begun to consider a life outside of politics.

His legacy may well be for another day, but in reflecting on how and when the trajectory of his leadership was altered, it is impossible not to conclude that the period between October 2019 and June 2020 was defining. In that time, he overcame crushing electoral lows to achieve political highs once thought unattainable. But they were ultimately impossible to repeat in his second act as Taoiseach.

It now falls to Simon Harris, another key player from that time, to revive a party whose TDs believe he can be their saviour, just as they once thought Varadkar could be.