With power, something has subtly changed in Leo
Is he shy or just introverted? And who can he trust? As Leo Varadkar assumes the mantle, there will be fascinating times ahead, says Brendan O’Connor
IT WAS a weird week to be binge-watching House of Cards. The echoes with real life in Donald Trump’s White House were uncanny. And weirdly, it made you think of Leo Varadkar as well. Unlike Frank Underwood, the fictional president in House of Cards, Leo has assumed the mantle of power without managing to seem too unattractively ambitious. The narrative has more been one of destiny than ambition. There was a sense that this had to happen, it’s been in the offing for ages, and Leo is just graciously going along with the inevitability.
And it’s fascinating to watch the power surging into Leo, making the boy a man. Something has subtly changed in him already. And all those suggestions that Leo might be flaky seem wide of the mark so far.
Despite worries that he was not the right man to do business with Fianna Fail, his meeting with Micheal Martin seems to have gone smoothly and agreement reached that FF will abstain and allow him to become Taoiseach. Despite a bit of posturing from the Independents, some of whom tried to characterise their interaction with Leo as them listing demands while Leo listened, he seems to be managing to herd those particular cats efficiently, too.
Everything else seems to be ticking along nicely. There seems to be a pay deal more or less in place before Leo assumes office, so he doesn’t have to dirty his hands with that, and he doesn’t have to prove any points about his supposed allegiance to the private sector.
Lucky Leo might even find that Brexit, which we all continue to underestimate in this country, might be looking a bit less damaging now, with Arlene Foster, a softer Brexiteer who is very much on the same page as us about a soft Border, having a seat at the table.
On the other hand, Leo might have given a shudder at how quickly Theresa May’s honeymoon diminished in the cold light of the campaign trail, so soon after her own coronation. May’s combative approach, her awkwardness around people and her woodenness as a speaker sometimes — all attributes Leo shares to an extent — saw her lose support to a man who was ultimately seen by young people as a nicer, warmer guy. No election here for now, presumably.
For Leo, the next hurdle for now will be choosing a Cabinet, and he seems to be working a no-drama approach there, as well. Last Thursday, he did that Leo thing of talking straight about it, which is incredibly refreshing after the linguistic acrobatics of our last two Taoisigh. He said he would be appointing people to Cabinet based on what was best for the country, and would take a degree of regional balance and gender balance into account. He even conceded that some people would be disappointed. But what was interesting was his core criterion for appointing ministers: trust. “Anyone who runs a Cabinet and anyone who heads up a Government, who heads up a football team, needs to know that everyone on the team is going to be fully behind your programme.”
This could seem like a perfectly innocuous thing to say in one way. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? You need to trust your guys. It has been seen by some as a hint that Leo doesn’t intend to appoint Simon Harris to Cabinet, which would put manners on Harris and also on Simon Coveney, who has come out publicly and said that he warned Leo in their meeting against penalising Coveney’s supporters, especially Harris. Leo gave Coveney a bit of a rap on the knuckles, too, when he refused to comment on the Harris thing, saying that he and Coveney had agreed to keep the contents of the meeting entirely confidential. Ouch.
But the trust thing is interesting right now. In this season of House of Cards, trust and mistrust have been central. At one point, as Frank, the president, and Claire, his wife and vice-president, start to distrust even each other, she says to him: “It’s hard to know who to trust these days.” “Isn’t it?” he shoots back. Trust and the ability to trust is a noble thing, but trust is also an obsession with people like the Underwoods, who have things to hide. When Donald Trump talks about wanting loyalty from James Comey, even honest loyalty, there are echoes of this, too. Just as Trump says he is under siege, Frank Underwood wonders at one point if he will have a target on his back for the duration of his presidency. These men talk about trust and loyalty, because they are suspicious of everyone and they are not transparent about how they do things. Trust and loyalty are almost starting to seem like vaguely dirty concepts these days — things demanded by crooked leaders in bunkers.
Leo is, of course, perfectly right to surround himself with people he can trust, but it does suggest a kind of a bunker mentality, and maybe even a slight paranoia. “Peo- ple I can trust” can also suggest yes-men. Everyone needs to be on board with Leo’s programme. You are either with him or against him, it seems. Dissenting voices are not wanted. It suggests tough leadership.
Noel Whelan used an interesting word about Leo on Friday, a word that had not been used before: ‘shy’. ‘Awkward’ and other words had been used, but not shy. People often conflate shyness and introversion. In fact, they are two different things. Susan M Cain, author of the seminal modern text on introversion Quiet, points out that: “Shyness and introversion are not the same thing. Shyness is the fear of negative judgment, and introversion is a preference for quiet, minimally stimulating environments.” For example, “Bill Gates is quiet and bookish, but apparently unfazed by others’ opinions of him: he’s an introvert, but not shy”. I don’t know how shy Leo is, but you’d suspect he has strong introvert tendencies. At times, he seems to have had to force himself to go out and engage with people. Introverts, despite what you might think, make good leaders. They think things through more than extroverts, and they listen more. But introverts can be slower to trust people.
And let’s face it, when twothirds of the members of the party voted against you, you might have some trust issues anyway. Also, you could argue that part of the steel needed to get to the top is to demand absolute loyalty.
The indications so far are that Leo is not going to be some wide-eyed, nice-guy leader.
Leo did not just stumble into power. It was planned in a cold and calculated way, and he systematically attempted to annihilate and humiliate his opponent over the first 24 hours of the competition. It was ruthless. And now the central thing he is demanding from his Cabinet is trust.
There are interesting times ahead for all of us, but especially for Leo. As he considers who to trust right now, he might do well to bear in mind another exchange from House of Cards. At one point, when the pressure is hotting up, Claire tells her husband not to get paranoid. Frank’s response: “If not now, when?”
‘Introverts make good leaders. They think things through and they listen more...’