Does Micheál Martin have the bravura to do what Theresa May did... and strike while the iron is hot?

Britain’s PM is trying to take out her foes at their lowest ebb. Right now Fianna Fáil’s leader is in a position to take the very same gamble

BACK in 2015, just after our two main parties had agreed to instal Enda Kenny as Taoiseach, I asked a senior Fianna Fáil TD how long it would take them to renege on the deal. Once opinion polls started going their way, I suggested, Fianna Fáil would cut and run to a general election in which they’d expect to emerge the biggest party.

‘Oh no,’ said the TD, ‘we need three years to get our candidates in the marginal seats ready. We won’t be going for an election before then.’ It was a simple, clear and fascinating insight into the party’s electoral strategy: as far as they are concerned, elections are won locally, on the ground. And their assessment is that it takes a candidate three years to become familiar enough on every doorstep to win a seat.

Shambolic

As it happens, there is some evidence to support this thesis (quite apart from Fianna Fáil’s extraordinary electoral track record over the past century, which makes you think they have some idea of what they’re doing). Academic analysis appears to suggest a link between a candidate calling to your door and your likelihood of voting for their party. Everything we’ve seen until now suggests Fianna Fáil is sticking rigidly by that strategy. On several occasions, they’ve pushed Fine Gael to the brink of a general election… only to back down again. As Leo Varadkar put it during the row over water charges: ‘Nobody wants a general election now.’

And yet… and yet. Looking across the water at Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election, you have to wonder whether Micheál Martin isn’t tempted to follow suit. Fortes fortuna iuvat, and all that.

There are, of course, myriad reasons why Mrs May has chosen to go to the polls now: but the simplest and plainest of these is that the main opposition party in Britain is in total and utter disarray. To call the British Labour party a shambles would be a disservice to the shambolic. Not only do the Conservatives have a 21point lead over Labour in the polls: the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has a negative satisfaction rating of a quite staggering 48%. When pollsters asked British voters on Tuesday who they trusted to run the UK economy, 51% chose the Tory team of Mrs May and Philip Hammond; only 12% said they trusted Labour’s Mr Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell to do the job. This means that half of the Labour party’s diehard voters don’t even trust their own team to manage Britain’s economy!

Of course we’ve all learned in recent years not to trust the polls: however, right now, all indications are that Mrs May will not only win a gigantic majority, but that she could, in doing so, virtually annihilate the Labour party as a political force in Britain. As Ireland AM’s perspicacious Mark Cagney put it to me yesterday morning, this decision means the Tories could potentially rule Britain for a decade – all because their leader was brave (and ruthless) enough to go to the country at the moment of her opponent’s maximum weakness.

So, what does all of that have to do with Fianna Fáil? Well, the answer is simple: right now is Fine Gael’s moment of maximum weakness. Imagine if a general election were called here tomorrow. What would Fine Gael do? The party’s leader, Enda Kenny, is deeply unpopular with the public. (His satisfaction rating in February was 27%, a full 17 points behind Mr Martin, although other polls have seen this gap narrowing more recently.) For all his personal charm, Mr Kenny is not confident on live TV or on the hustings. Micheál Martin was widely considered to have wiped the floor with him in TV debates last time: most people would expect the same result this time, only worse.

And this is not just surmise. An Ireland Thinks poll for this paper last month showed that, under Enda Kenny, Fine Gael would lose seats to Micheál Martin in a general election. This is confirmed by all other polls, both on current voting intentions and satisfaction with the party leaders. Only by changing leader before the next election can Fine Gael hope to defeat Fianna Fáil. (As it happens, our poll showed that under either Leo Varadkar or Simon Coveney, Fine Gael would win at a canter.)

Unpopular

Faced with an immediate general election, Fine Gael would have two appalling choices. Either they could go into an election with an unpopular leader who would cost them victory; or they could try to change leaders as quickly as possible. But that second scenario is fraught with potential disaster. What if Mr Kenny decided not to step down? He’s perfectly capable of arguing that ‘this is no time for a leadership contest’. There would then have to be a motion of no confidence in him by his own party – many of whose TDs would also be arguing that a general election campaign is simply not the moment to unseat a party leader. And what if that heave failed, like the last one? You’d have Fine Gael candidates knocking on doors telling you to vote for a man they clearly don’t think is up to the job.

Even if Mr Kenny were to go (voluntarily or otherwise), the party leadership election process takes three weeks in order to allow the grassroots members a vote – and there’s no obvious way in which that timetable can be shortened.

Disastrous

Denying the membership their say would be disastrous, given that they’ll all be needed to knock on doors in the runup to the election. But if the election campaign is five weeks long, that would mean Fine Gael spending the first three weeks – at least – deciding who its leader should be. The candidates would be fighting each other, rather than Fianna Fáil. (Apologies, but I can’t see either Simon Coveney or Leo Varadkar stepping aside for the other.)

It’s not just a question of who the frontman would be, either. The party wouldn’t be able to put together a manifesto, or a front-bench team, until it had a leader: how could it expect the Irish public to support a party with no manifesto and no top team? Ultimately, Fine Gael would be asking voters to buy a pig in a poke: we all know how that transaction ends.

And whoever wins, assuming a reasonably close contest, there’s every chance Fine Gael would rip itself to shreds during the process; afterwards, Fianna Fáil would be able to say that almost half the Fine Gael party didn’t back the new leader. All of which begs a simple question of Micheál Martin: why hesitate? Yes, Fianna Fáil has a long-term strategy: but sometimes leadership involves changing strategy in the light of new opportunities. Mrs May’s original strategy was to sit out her remaining term as prime minister, but circumstances changed – and she acted. At this stage, that decisiveness looks like it will benefit her and her party enormously. The question for Mr Martin is: does he have it in him to take the same risk – and potentially reap similar rewards?