She was all jizzied up: feverish hours Leo chose his men (and a few women)
Watching Leo Varadkar at the big Fine Gael funeral in Dungarvan last Monday, it was clear he was going to be a very different Taoiseach from any that had gone before. As he was driven to the gate of St Mary’s Parish Church, Dungarvan, in his 2013 Audi, he stared straight ahead. He failed to acknowledge those who stared at him from the street. He wore the same tight, straight-lipped smile – that verges on a grimace – he wore all week. This was the funeral of the former Fine Gael Minister for Agriculture Austin Deasy, who was a Waterford TD for 25 years. His son John was elected to the seat in 2002 and he is tipped to be a minister in Varadkar’s Government. So the Deasy family and Fine Gael understood that this would become a major political event.
He stepped from the car, and stood alone in the tarmacked yard, with a thousand-yard stare, avoiding eye contact. The odd Fine Gael supporter took the initiative and approached him, for a weak handshake.
There was no stampede, little interaction with Varadkar and no excitement. Alan Dukes, a former Fine Gael leader, and hardly the warmest man you’ll meet, hugged Deasy family members and worked the crowd. Former Fine Gael minister Michael Lowry got a kiss from a priest.
Varadkar’s mother is from Dungarvan. His predecessors Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny would have been in their element on such occasions – solicitous and full of bonhomie. Varadkar seemed out of place and mentally elsewhere. Yet he missed nothing, later texting people to thank them for attending. He’s not bad, just different. New politics has a new type of Taoiseach. Back-slapping at country funerals is not his milieu. His world is Twitter, Facebook, TV and radio studios and the soft interview. But, in the top job, you must manage people. You must understand what motivates them and what repels them.
On Wednesday, after being elected Taoiseach by 57 votes to 50, Varadkar failed his first test, his Cabinet formation. Because he failed to display emotional intelligence.
This Taoiseach, who was supposed to be a new broom to Enda Kenny’s tired tenure, largely kept his predecessor’s jaded Cabinet. And the lesser politicians who had helped him defeat Coveney were spurned.
Just one, Eoghan Murphy, has been promoted. And even his elevation seemed in doubt. On Tuesday night, a backbencher who was key in Varadkar’s rise told me he got word to the Taoiseach-elect. He had gotten wind of some eccentric scheme to make Murphy, Varadkar’s leadership election manager, a ‘minister without portfolio’. The backbencher told Varadkar’s inner circle this wasn’t on.
‘Murph [Murphy’s less than imaginative nickname] can’t be shafted like that,’ he said. There was a plan for Murphy to be a minister without portfolio attached the Department of the Taoiseach, with a brief to ‘watch the Taoiseach’s back’. Watch his back from who wasn’t clear. In fact none of it was clear. Murphy was also given the impression it could be an expansion of chief whip, which is Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach. The scheme was dropped.
Still, it did not give off a good vibe. Murphy had been expecting one of the great offices of State and he was getting this ill-defined job. This indicated muddled thinking. The Taoiseach’s inner circle deny this stunt was seriously considered. But Murphy and other TDs were aware of the moves.
At noon on Wednesday, Kenny informed the Dáil of his resignation. Then Kenny nominated his enemy Varadkar to be the next Taoiseach. He was seconded by Dublin TD Josepha Madigan and elected. Then, at 2.40pm, Varadkar stepped through the front door of Leinster House to be greeted by a guard of honour of Fine Gael TDs and Ministers. Standing tall, erect and with his head held high, he moved mechanically along the line, with that strained, straight-lipped nearsmile again. It was as if there was a little automated voice inside his head saying, ‘must look happy, must shake hands’.
He got into a top-of-the-range 730d BMW with a Garda driver and blue flashing lights. The Secretary General to the Government, Martin Fraser and Varadkar’s chief adviser Brian Murphy got in, too. Their car was followed by two 530d BMWs, carrying gardaí and members of his family, including his father, Ashok.
At Áras an Uachtaráin, the new Taoiseach was given the official seal by President Michael D Higgins and he was at Government Buildings in less than an hour. In Leinster House offices, TDs waited for a phone call. In Government Buildings, Cabinet ministers sat in their offices on the main ministerial corridor of black and white marble. At the end of this corridor is a door that leads to the Circular Corridor (it’s oval shaped). The first to walk the Circular Corridor to Varadkar, after 4.30pm, was Simon Coveney, his chief rival. Coveney passed through the small rotunda outside the Taoiseach’s office, past the sculpture of the Children of Lir, by Oisín Kelly, and into the Taoiseach’s office.
It now has Varadkar’s personal touches. Leo has come to understand that sports are important to the simple folk. He now has two framed and signed jerseys – a Dublin Gaelic football jersey and an Ireland rugby shirt – hanging on the oak panels from the ancient wood of Coolattin in Co Wicklow.
Over the Bossi fireplace, Varadkar has, amazingly, hung a portrait of Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Seán Lemass alongside the portrait of Fine Gael hero Michael Collins. Kenny erected Collins. Varadkar’s meetings with ministers were longer than those that Kenny held. One on one, Varadkar is a much more comfortable. Deep down, he is thoughtful and he is able to focus his attention on you. The meeting between the two was warm and Varadkar said Coveney would move from the hell of Housing to Foreign Affairs. He will be the point man on Brexit.
Then came Paschal Donohoe who’d struck the first deal with Varadkar. He had been promised the Department of Finance very early. Now that he has combined that department with Public Expenditure, he is the second most powerful man in Government.
Next came Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald. She has presided over incessant scandals at Justice. She was promoted to Enterprise and Innovation. Varadkar lived near Fitzgerald as a child in Castleknock and his father was her GP. She was a mentor. She, too, was once a leadership contender but she surprisingly backed Varadkar. And then came Charlie Flanagan, who was given Fitzgerald’s old job at Justice. Richard Bruton, who had lobbied for an economic portfolio came soon after. He continues with Education. Simon Harris had perhaps the longest meeting with Varadkar.
Their similarities exceed their differences. Varadkar, who has unfinished business at Health pledged to give Harris more support and more money at that deadly department. Harris left ‘enthused’,
according to witnesses. The running order gives some hint of the importance of the deals that were struck. Coveney was brought in for unity. But the public commitments of Fitzgerald, 66 (67 in August), Flanagan, 60, and Bruton, 64, were crucial to Varadkar’s slaying of Coveney. And they were guaranteed to be kept in.
It is their retention that has so angered Vardkar’s supporters on the backbenches.
‘Frances has had a six-year run in Cabinet, she has been Tánaiste,’ said a TD, ‘she has not had a time at Justice. You could have said goodbye, and asked her to allow somebody younger in.
‘And she would have had no support to rally around her.’
Another said of Bruton: ‘He was a junior minister in the 1980s, he was a Cabinet minister in the 1990s and has had a six-year run in Cabinet under Kenny. And all this came after he abandoned us all in 2011 and took a job.’ He was referring to Bruton heading a heave against Kenny in 2010 when he turned his back on his backbench support.
A member of Varadkar’s inner circle said brutally; ‘I suppose Leo wanted to recognise the fact that many people had openly backed him. He had to acknowledge them.’
At the end came the super juniors, a silly name for a silly idea that was dreamt up to give Democratic Left a seat at Cabinet in the 1990s. They have no true power in their departments but get a whopping salary and a non-voting seat at Cabinet.
Mary Mitchell O’Connor was demoted to this role. She was disappointed, but not openly upset. I spoke to a civil servant who met her as she came out of the Taoiseach’s office – he said she was calm.
She considered things and returned for a second meeting where she accepted a super junior ministry.
Another female minister Regina Doherty wore a navy Max Mara dress her husband Declan bought her for their wedding anniversary last Christmas. It was only the second time she’d worn it. The couple were married on St Stephen’s Day.
She told female colleagues that she felt she was a little slimmer when she first wore it. ‘I am bet into it,’ she exclaimed to friends. ‘It’s the most expensive dress I ever wore.’
Doherty’s schedule was a little different from the other ministers on Wednesday. As chief whip, she had constant duties in the Dáil chamber on Wednesday – mainly to call adjournments as the delays stretched. It was the longer meetings and an overoptimistic schedule that caused the adjournments.
She waited and waited over in the Whip’s office in Leinster House. Then she got a phone call from Martin Fraser’s office at about 6.15pm.
‘She was all jizzied up and delighted, then she got over and was told will you ask for an hour’s recess,’ said a Government source, ‘I think they were only winding her up.’ Then there was an hour wait. Mitchell O’Connor’s first meeting with Varadkar came after the big appointments of Coveney, Donohoe, Fitzgerald and Flanagan. As fifth in line, she had a ten-minute meeting. The details of her precise role were finalised later, in a separate conversation.
Most of the meetings were over ten minutes – Regina’s took only three, despite the fact that Social Protection and elements of the Department of Jobs have been amalgamated.
‘She was sitting there like a Cheshire cat. The only question she had was “what does the amalgamation of the two departments entail?”’ said a source. ‘She was just thrilled,’ they added.
After the Cabinet meeting at the Áras, the ministers – new and reappointed – went into a reception room for prawns and wine.
Mitchell O’Connor stood alone. Doherty approached her, but didn’t know what to say. So she rubbed her arm. In a way that says something but doesn’t say anything.
Mitchell O’Connor replied to the gesture: ‘Well I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t disappointed. But, in actual fact, I have worked my behind off for the last year.’
There is a feeling among some female TDs that there has been an element of misogyny about the criticism of Mitchell O’Connor.
‘She’s not soft, she’s tough and she’ll carry on and she’ll be back,’ a source told me this week.
Although how she’s going to fare when her €16,000 pay bump to super junior becomes a matter of controversy in the Dáil, remains to be seen. Of course, she wasn’t the only one disappointed.
When Varadkar entered the Dáil, in 2007, he did so alongside his Young Fine Gael friend Lucinda Creighton.
The third in their close group was John Paul Phelan. Just four months older than Varadkar, he had been a senator since 2002.
As Varadkar’s career soared, Kenny fixer Phil Hogan kept his foot firmly on Phelan’s throat in the Carlow-Kilkenny constituency.
JP, as the gregarious TD is known in Leinster House, is Varadkar’s longest and most loyal supporter. With Hogan and Kenny departed, Phelan was released.
On Wednesday, he displayed hubris by posting photos of himself on social media putting on his good tie and suit. He got nothing. Now he is expecting a junior ministry when they are doled out on Tuesday.
But Wexford’s Michael D’Arcy has worked just as hard for Varadkar. His career too has suffered. He should get a junior, too.
John Deasy, Fergus O’Dowd, Pat Deering, Brendan Griffin, Noel Rock, Alan Farrell, Josepha Madigan and Joe Carey have all played important roles in the Varadkar advance. All have suffered under Kenny. Helen McEntee will expect to be retained as a Junior.
And, of course, not one got into Cabinet in the place of a veteran Kennyite.
One said: ‘I was surprised I was surprised. Just one more of us in Cabinet would have made a huge difference.’
There will be nowhere near enough vacancies without bloodshed. Bloodshed would create a sizeable rump of seething demoted juniors.
On Thursday morning, amazingly, a revolt was brewing. Supporters were incandescent. It was John Deasy, who had lost his father only five days earlier, who got on the phone to calm people.
He explained Varadkar’s realpolitik.
Now that’s loyalty. Can Varadkar repay it?