With Enda under siege, the big question is: Where is Leo?
ENDA Kenny’s ‘Bejaysus, I wish I didn’t have to go back and face what I have to face’ in Washington was neither funny nor sophisticated. But it also betrayed any notion that he was taking the election result well. Enda is under siege as Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael.
But where is Leo Varadkar, his supposed heir apparent?
He seems, like Kenny, according to close colleagues, paralysed by political events. Loyal Leo men in Fine Gael have waited since the aborted 2010 heave against Kenny for him to make his grab for power. But it never came.
Where many in Fine Gael are unsurprised by Kenny’s reaction, they are deeply disappointed by Varadkar. In conversations I have had with Fine Gael ministers in recent weeks a few words are repeated in reference to Varadkar – ‘inactive’, ‘ damaged’ and, ever increasingly, ‘commentator’.
Colleagues believe Varadkar does not have the killer instinct required of a frontline politician. Kenny is there for the taking down, and what does Varadkar do? He gives interviews in radio and television studios. He has, say disappointed Fine Gael colleagues, become a celebrity politician, a noncombatant. A mere current affairs commentator.
He was supposed to be a central figure in the Fine Gael general election campaign. It was one of the worst-run, most misguided election campaigns in Irish political history. Varadkar is marked by that defeat. As the campaign floundered a minister asked me, in one of those industrial estate venues that the party had chosen for a rally, ‘where is our Brian Cowen? We need Leo to take control’. He meant Brian Cowen of 2007, the ebullient and articulate finance minister of that year’s general election campaign (not the meek, silent taoiseach of the 2008-2011 term).
Varadkar, instead of ebullient and aggressive, was meek and silent. There was the Morning Ireland interview that a minister described to me as ‘self-serving’. He was defeated in a TV debate by Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath.
The celebrity politician could have visited constituencies to target struggling colleagues. But he didn’t. One campaign day he visited the Dublin North-West constituency of Noel Rock. He spent most of his time in a café with the candidate and the Taoiseach, surrounded by supporters, discussing campaign videos.
The campaign managers consistently failed to get their big guns targeting ordinary voters. Leo could have dashed out of that café and spent hours campaigning in north Dublin, instead he spent just 45 minutes meeting punters.
Why did he not act to confront the madness of the Fine Gael campaign?
If you cover politics long enough, you start to notice certain signs. Last week, when I met Fine Gael, Independents and Fianna Fáil TDs in the corridors of Leinster House they all referred to figures of ‘60-70 TDs’ being acceptable to form a minority government. When they all speak of the same figures you know that the political establishment has reached a consensus. That will do.
In the bars and restaurants around Leinster House, where I have been hanging out with Fine Gael TDs as we wait for a government to be formed, I ask them all the same questions – ‘What is wrong with Leo? Why does he do nothing?’
In answering, many of them refer to the same thing, of course: that radio interview.
It was the moment of his greatest triumph. In January 2015 he told the nation that he is a gay man in a radio interview with another celebrity, Miriam O’Callaghan of RTÉ.
However, Fine Gael TDs zeroed in on something else he said. Discussing his further life plans he said: ‘I have my exit strategy, either go back to college or study abroad, or do something medical and political abroad’ he said.
‘I don’t see myself in politics at 51, I definitely want to do something else,’ he said.
‘Whatever I do next it will be different, not politics,’ he said.
To you and me, perhaps, for a 37-year-old (he was 36 then) qualified doctor to express these hopes and aspirations seems modern, sophisticated and reasonable.
But not to politicians. They are not like you and me. Their very life and blood goes into their job. For most, politics dominates their every living breath. Theirs is a deep passion, an obsession that never fades.
Last week, a Fine Gael TD said to me: ‘I can’t come to terms with that. A politician who says he wants to leave the game when he’s 51 doesn’t seem interested enough to me.’
And maybe those few words best explain the recent behaviour of Leo.