A new vision for FG and an early election could be the icing on Leo’s cupcake

So Leo Varadkar is the change candidate. Change from what, we might be forgiven for asking, given Varadkar has spent the last six years as a member of Enda Kenny’s cabinet and has been quite content to see the politics of drift dominate Irish life over the past 12 months.

But – in one bound – the hero of Fine Gael is now free from the shackles of Kenny and seems to have the leadership won before the campaign has even properly begun.

The hype around Varadkar has reached stratospheric levels within the rarefied confines of the Fine Gael parliamentary party. Two of the party’s heavy hitters, Paschal Donohoe and Charlie Flanagan, were inflicted with a strange type of hubris last Friday when describing their cabinet colleague.

Donohoe, in a bravura performance on Morning Ireland, described Varadkar as the most capable politician of the era. There was, however, something rather too clever by half in Donohoe and Varadkar meeting the press in Leo Street.

Meanwhile, the normally steady Flanagan, in a tetchy exchange with the broadcaster Seán O’Rourke, referred to Varadkar as the change candidate and took the view that Fine Gael would be far better off being led by a Dublin TD given that the capital would be the main battleground in elections to come.

This spectacularly missed the point that Fine Gael’s difficulties in the 2016 general election were mostly rural in nature. Their vote held up remarkably well in Dublin. Unexpected victories on the northside for Donohoe and for Enda Kenny’s bête noir Noel Rock were copperfastened by the two seats the party won in both Dublin Bay South and Dún Laoghaire.

By contrast Fine Gael was fully wiped out in its rural heartland of Tipperary and won only 12 out of 43 seats in Munster. It was equally as bad in the Taoiseach’s bailiwick of Connacht-Ulster, where the party only won eight out of 28 seats. By contrast, Fianna Fáil’s recovery was based in Munster and the west of Ireland where it outpolled its bitter rival.

Yet the Kenny loyalists in the west flocked to Varadkar in the opening 24 hours of the campaign. They are convinced Leo is the man to save their seats and bring a new generation of voters to the great political movement that is Fine Gael.

There might well be a touch of wishful thinking in this expectation that Varadkar is the panacea to their woes. In that context it was good to see the man himself set out the view that, under his leadership, Fine Gael would be a campaigning party.

Echoing the great French philospher Jean Jacques Rousseau, Varadkar’s call for a new social contract, with everyone having an equal opportunity, was a welcome development.

For too long Fine Gael has struggled to explain what it stands for and what vision it has for the country.

The party, its leader, TDs, and supporters completely misinterpreted the 2011 general election as a resounding victory for its innate goodness. Believing it was elected to fix the mess caused by the feckless Fianna Fáilers, the Blueshirts luxuriated in the idea that it was Ireland’s new natural party of government. The reality was that the 40% of the electorate that had always voted Fianna Fáil wanted to punish the sol- diers of destiny. That centrist vote could only go to Fine Gael or Labour. At its heart it was a soft vote.

The problem for Fine Gael in 2016 was that it gave the people no good reason to vote for it. Its vacuous ‘Keep the recovery going’ slogan summed up the ineptitude of its campaign. The result was the reduction to its core vote of 26%. The extra 10% who had brought Fine Gael to the heights of 36% of the vote and 76 seats in 2011 decided it needed more reason to vote for the party than was on offer.

Fianna Fáil’s Lazarus-like comeback in 2016 was down to the fact that its message of social fairness resonated with the people.

Fine Gael had no such message. In fact it really had no message at all beyond a ‘We’re doing a grand job, leave us at it’ narrative. Alas for them and particularly for Kenny, the Irish people in the austerity era need convincing before parting with their vote.

If Varadkar is to change the nature of Irish politics and bring lasting electoral success to Fine Gael he needs to espouse a vision for the party that Kenny, for one, could never do. In fact no leader of Fine Gael since Garret FitzGerald has given the electorate a good reason to vote for the party beyond the fact that it was not Fianna Fáil.

Both Varadkar and Simon Coveney realise that in the fluidity of the current electoral cycle, people need good reasons to vote for political parties and that this goes beyond personalities. Alas, many in the Fine Gael parliamentary party are curiously unaware of this fact, including Varadkar’s Dublin West running mate, Senator Catherine Noone, who in declaring her support for him pointed out that the X factor mattered in the leadership contest.

Politics is about more than personality. Enda Kenny is living proof of this thesis. There was a reason to vote for Fine Gael in 2011 in that it wasn’t Fianna Fáil and was more likely to lead a recovery than any other political alternative. There was very little reason to vote for Fine Gael in 2016 after the country had been stabilised.

If Coveney was somewhat over the top in saying on Thursday that the leadership contest was a battle for the soul of Fine Gael, at least he recognised that Fine Gael has to have a soul which it can put on display to the country.

Varadkar in his comments about Fine Gael needing to become a campaigning party realises the very same thing. Of course, the best way both of them can show this is to seek their own mandate from the people.

Brexit has fundamentally changed the political narrative of this State. The political drift caused by the long goodbye of Enda Kenny and the lack of legislation that is the ultimate result of the confidence and supply arrangement need to be rectified as a matter of urgency.

Going to the country seeking a new mandate is not without its risks, especially for a new Taoiseach enjoying the trappings of power.

But Varadkar knows his Shakespeare. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,’ said Brutus in Julius Caesar.

Varadkar’s flood will be the Budget negotiations. Much better for him and Fine Gael to seek a new mandate than to wait for Fianna Fáil to do so.