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There is doubt over the Taoiseach’s understanding of the world beyond Leinster House, writes Willie O’Dea

Leo can’t hide behind his spin machine, says Willie O’Dea

IT is not often I feel moved to quote or reference the leader of the UK Liberal Democrats party, Vince Cable.

Though he is undoubtedly a clever man and is one of the very few politicians still active in politics at Westminster to grasp the chaos that Brexit will bring, Cable is not someone whose name crops up very often on this side of the Irish Sea these days.

The reason I mention him now is nothing to do with Brexit. Indeed, it is not even to do with anything he has said as party leader or even as a former British cabinet minister.

It actually goes as far back as late 2007. Then Cable was the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats and was taking on the then Labour PM Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Brown was politically on the ropes. Within a few short weeks, the Labour leader had gone from being strong and controlling to weak and indecisive.

While the Tories revelled in Brown’s predicament, it fell to Cable to deliver the coup de grace.

With masterful understatement Cable opened with his question with the withering putdown: “This House has noticed the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the past few weeks — from Stalin to Mr Bean… creating chaos out of order rather than order out of chaos.”

It was an expert and skilled summation of the situation.

Fast forward to last week in Dail Eireann and you will find the same assessment could just as easily be applied to Leo Varadkar.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen the Taoiseach similarly wane and decline before our very eyes. Not for the first time, we have seen him tested by events, many of his own making, and then flunking that test.

What the Taoiseach and his team may think looks and sounds like strength and forcefulness, in reality comes across as nothing more than bluster and arrogance, an impression that is re-enforced by the rush to the social media keyboard by ambitious parliamentary colleagues eager to tell us all what a political colossus he truly is.

What they seem not to realise is that there is no virtue or skill in political stubbornness or self-assurance, particularly when it can be so easily exposed when the situation goes off script.

What the political events of the past few weeks — most notably the surprise resignation of Denis Naughten and the consequent mini-reshuffle — have again shown is that the image of the self-assured, confident and commanding leader that Fine Gael attempts to project on Varadkar is purely that: just an image.

It is an illusion which is, in the words of George Orwell, intended “…to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.

The reason they do it is because, most of the time, it works. When the Taoiseach is in a set-piece situation, one where the script is pre-determined and his team of spinmasters and image makers have been able to role-play the scenario, the illusion plays well, even productively.

But change just one move, include one element or one contingency for which his advisers or senior officials have not mapped out a response, and things fall apart.

In these situations, the Taoiseach is then forced to rely on his personal well of experience, judgment and political understanding and — as we saw last week — the levels there are quite low.

This is not due to any lack of intelligence on the part of the Fine Gael leader. He is clearly intelligent and even assiduous. During my time facing Varadkar as an Opposition spokesperson, I saw him handle and deal with complex situations with relative ease.

I do not doubt his grasp of theoretical politics and political processes — but I do doubt his understanding of Irish politics and of the real world out beyond the bubble of Leinster House and Government Buildings.

The remoteness which perhaps affords him the ruthlessness which Fine Gael thinks is his greatest skill may soon prove itself to be his — and its — greatest single weakness.

Willie O’Dea is a Fianna Fail TD for Limerick City

‘We have seen the Taoiseach wane and decline before our very eyes’