Simon’s a decent guy, but Leo’s the leader FG needs

LEO VARADKAR’S cheesy soundbite appealing to people who get up early in the morning was the first topic on the agenda wherever Fine Gaelers met for breakfast last week. Simon Coveney thinks it is dogwhistle politics, a coded insult to men in sleeping bags and people who have no reason to get up.

The phrase can be interpreted as either sinister or self-improving – their meaning is in the gift of the beholder.

For instance, the implication of Varadkar’s suspected weasel words praising people who get up early in the morning can be inverted by a wry Mark Twain quote: ‘Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep till noon.’

And with just four days to polling, the contest still seems fixated on Leo’s ‘rise and shine’ marketing slogan and Simon’s concept, the ‘Just Society’ – both too trite for serious men seeking high office.

At Thursday night’s debate, Simon was miffed at Leo for spending 12 months preparing for the leadership contest. Leo said it was only three months but his body language quoted GK Chesterton: ‘You can’t love a thing without wanting to fight for it.’ That exchange amplifies their respective appeal to voters: Leo is hungrier and will do whatever it takes to win; Simon, in figurative cardigan and slippers, was waiting for the leadership to be delivered to his door.

IF A panel of management consultants were interviewing Coveney and Varadkar to select a new CEO for a multinational corporation, which of them would get the job? I bet the panel would plump for Varadkar – he has more ‘varoom’, consultant dude-speak for ‘get up and go’. Leo’s social liberalism attracts younger voters who see him as cooler than Simon, the more cautious and reserved family man. Last week, hyperventilating Coveney supporters compared the difference in their styles to Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare.

The allegory, a grotesquely exaggerated caricature of their political personalities, is insulting to Varadkar but also unfair to Coveney. Leo’s ideas are more complex than Fine Gael’s traditional view of more personal responsibility for citizens who are less dependent on the State – support for the ‘coping class’. Rural party veterans seem to have accepted his sexual orientation, while his forensic intelligence and instinct for the market economy is a plus.

Coveney’s early difficulties arose from him not being as proficient in launching his campaign – and it is compounded by his ‘Just Society’ pitch harking back to the 1960s.

Is Coveney trying to attract disillusioned supporters of the Labour Party at the expense of support from diehard Blueshirts?

Yet Varadkar is impetuous: he has a low boredom threshold, is impatient and fidgets with his phone when someone can’t keep up with his stream of consciousness.

But Leo’s candour in promising not to hang around politics for another 20 years is refreshing. Simon is a decent man from a very privileged family but he was outgunned by a passionate moderniser with an insatiable curiosity.

Cynical FGers sympathising with Simon interpreted an editorial backing him in Thursday’s Irish Times as a backhanded compliment. And the kiss of death was a confusing opinion poll published on Friday – old-school Fine Gaelers suspect The Irish Times of being a posh Labour Party pamphlet.

SPARE a thought for Fine Gael’s leader in the Senate, Jerry Buttimer, a Corkman and a key figure in Simon Coveney’s campaign to lead the party. Jerry was also a pioneer for gay rights and stood shoulder to shoulder with Leo Varadkar in the campaign for same-sex marriage.

But last week mischievous colleagues accused him of being the Varadkar cuckoo in the Coveney nest. It is a scurrilous allegation, totally untrue. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

QUESTION: what do you call someone who wastes tens of millions of euro in taxpayers’ money and then empties the bank accounts of third-level students’ parents? Answer: it can be doctor or even professor but it’s usually an ‘educator’.

Hats off to reporter Conor Ryan and RTÉ Investigates for shining a light last Thursday on the shocking squandering of our hardearned cash by super-smug universities. Is the scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money as obnoxious as the ducking and

HOTELIER John Fitzpatrick held a discreet and exclusive cocktail party last week to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the opening of his landmark hotel in New York. The number of the guests in Farrier & Draper didn’t reach three digits, but attendees included two men who have served as taoiseach – Enda Kenny and Bertie Ahern. Bertie has lost a ton of weight and Enda was demob happy, making a very witty speech and even tickling the woman sitting beside him, who had arrived with me.

THE Mounties in the Rockies are calling Nóirín O’Sullivan to Canada, I’m told. Word is the embattled Garda Commissioner may be taking up a position there; both academia and security have been mentioned.

The Canadian ambassador to Ireland, Kevin Vickers, is understood to been helpful through her recent crisis – and other friends think Nóirín would be well advised to quit before a new taoiseach is in place. diving of arrogant academics? A moot point: you can’t have one without the other.