Why you just can’t help liking angry Mr Browne
WHEN I meet people for the first time, they always want to know about the real Vincent Browne: is scary Mr Angry on television Mr Softie off camera? He has created a formidable television persona since Tonight With Vincent Browne was first broadcast in 2007, and I was a sometime locum when Dr Browne was unavailable.
Presenting himself as an avenger of the poor and downtrodden cast him as a champion for a chorus of antisocial media trolls. It is a role that the ultimate contrarian blithely dismisses – but one he relishes.
Browne turned a decades-long mid-life crisis as Mr Angry into a nice little earner on television.
His career has been punctuated by unquenchable enthusiasms and monumental crises over two generations and he clearly thrives on white-knuckle stress.
But Mr Angry was anathema to many senior politicians, who believe he holds them to standards he fails to live up to himself. Others felt mocked and patronised.
Why, say some politicians, should I go on his programme to be sneered and jeered at by a show-off bully with a microphone?
Yet when he privately met those same politicians and others (including me) with whom he vehemently disagreed in public, he usually made a joke and bought a drink.
Vincent is a complex man riddled with contradictions: I have never seen the avowed feminist happier than when he is sat with a table of men swapping badinage and salty tittle-tattle.
And our most enjoyable conversations were confined to what his humourless leftie admirers might call ‘social history’.
After ritually noting the foolishness of the government, opposition and issues of the day, we addressed who was doing what to whom where and why. In the abstract, Vincent disapproves of gossip and casual calumny, yet he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of some important people’s lives – the sort of detail that most would prefer to remain confidential.
He was, and still is, on first-name terms with almost everyone who is anyone in Irish public life, and if they live or lived an exciting personal life, Vincent (and I) usually admired them more.
My favourite Vincent story was of a lunch at the Berkeley Court Hotel with Charles Haughey when Haughey was taoiseach.
Browne arrived 20 minutes late, spluttering an apology, and Haughey, who was a stickler for punctuality, raised his voice to admonish him.
‘Taoiseach,’ whispered Browne, ‘please keep your voice down, the other diners will think we are homosexual lovers having a tiff.’ Haughey’s voice dropped to a more conversational tone.
Haughey and Browne was an onoff political item for the next 30 years and Vincent even asked him to invest in his publications, promising him anonymity. Charlie declined.
BUT Browne visited him regularly at his home in Kinsealy, drinking fine wines and swapping yarns in the years before Haughey’s death in 2006. He has been working on a biography of the late taoiseach for the past decade. He also roped in a succession of the country’s wealthiest businessmen to invest in his companies throughout his earlier years, but their altruism never protected them from his editorial wrath. His ground-breaking journalism led the State to tap his phone for eight years.
In 1995, the State paid compensation to Vincent of £91,000 (worth approximately €175,000 today) and insisted on a confidentiality clause, although he was allowed to read the transcripts. The money was used to fund his many failed publishing ventures.
When I met him after the settlement, he told me that his conversations with me were included in the transcripts and that the personal details were scurrilous and potentially seriously embarrassing (for me, he said).
Browne and I decided they would have entertained a bored special branch detective transcribing the calls and any politicians who read them but there was nothing that posed any threat to the State. I never worked for Vincent (that may explain how our friendship endured for so long) and we had great lunches and dinners with other ageing mischief-makers.
Many years after their very combative public exchanges, Haughey’s former press secretary, the late PJ Mara, Vincent and a few old friends met up at Smyth’s pub in Dublin to celebrate PJ becoming a father again at 72. Browne arrived with a suitcase-size hamper of Pampers for his old friend.
At their highest levels, the media and politics are blood sports: often unforgiving, usually ending in failure. But somehow Vincent Browne maintained many Olympic-class friendships.
On Friday night I was invited to the party celebrating his final TV3 programme, and every time I meet Vincent Browne making mischief, it is like drinking Champagne for the first time… I HAD booked flights and accommodation for a trip to the US in October before the new White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci fired his toxic volley of expletives. Sadly, I fear that ‘the Mooch’ may not be available for drinks during my stay. I’m told that he can swear for a full three minutes without repeating an expletive – a talent that makes him the go-to guy for insults and, apparently, for laughs. I MET a young waiter from Venezuela in Howth last week. He was worried sick about his family back home as the rotten regime in Caracas bankrupts his homeland and attacks its citizens. Yet not a word of condemnation or even criticism from Sinn Féin and the other lefties who for years held up the socialist government of Venezuela as an example to us all.