We need firm rule. Go to the country, Leo

AFTER months of anticipation, the end of Enda Kenny’s leadership was inevitably an anticlimax. While he devoted 35 years to the banal business of being re-elected, his 15 years as party leader, and then Taoiseach, define his legacy.

In 2002 he took command of a moribund party and renewed it. He performed this feat a second time in 2011 when he became Taoiseach of a demoralised country, revitalising it with a spirit of optimism.

Disastrous Fianna Fáil-led governments brought the country to ruin, and while the groundwork for recovery was laid as Kenny took charge and the Troika was effectively a fiscal manager, he steered the country through turbulent times.

He can take a lot of credit for the healthy economy, the 7% unemployment rate. He was a pragmatist and could be ruthless when threatened as the putsch against him showed; the timidity of Varadkar and Coveney in the matter of his departure showed a fear of the consequences of crossing him, even when weakened.

But his mishandling of the Garda whistleblower crisis was his death knell and the battle to replace him appears as great an anti-climax as his leaving.

The new Fine Gael leader will almost certainly be Leo Varadkar. He must begin negotiations to shore up the brittle coalition and assert his authority. The Independent Alliance will have demands, Fianna Fáil might grow restless, and the crises that accelerated Kenny’s departure have not gone away. The Garda inquiries will be completed in his term, he inherits the divisive Repeal the Eighth campaign and Brexit looms on the horizon.

The Dáil will break for summer in a matter of weeks and while the minority Government will return, its inherent instability will keep its hands tied. The dynamism of the new leader will be undercut by stagnant legislative activity, stasis in Government and nothing achieved. We need an election in September. The new leader needs a mandate from the people if he is to put his stamp on the future.

Varadkar has looked to a new generation of leaders on the world stage, Macron in France and Trudeau in Canada. He has told the Irish Times that ‘the politics of the future is different. It’s the division, I think, as Blair and others have identified, of progressive versus regressive, and open versus closed.’

He seems to have an eye on Theresa May too. The British Conservative leader inherited a party from the ideologically thin tenure of David Cameron. Varadkar inherits the party from the empty rhetoric of Kenny’s New Politics. May unfurled a manifesto signalling a new seriousness. Varadkar believes his party must become a campaigning party; it certainly needs a new philosophy to define the new era.

But there is another similarity between the two: neither has won a general election as party leader. May is attempting to do just that and Varadkar has shown some skill in running a clever campaign for the Fine Gael leadership, but if he is serious about creating a new party, of forging new politics and is primed for the monumental fight in Europe over Brexit, then he should seek a mandate from the people in September. Go on, Leo. Do it for yourself, and for the country.