Has Martin the measure of our gadabout leader?

GAME on! The next general election will be a no-holds-barred presidential slugfest but the burning question is: when will the combatants face the voters? Leo Varadkar going ‘mano a mano’ with Micheál Martin will be a gladiatorial contest with the loser shamed and blamed for his party’s defeat.

The electorate will be faced with a tantalising choice: a clever young Fine Gael boulevardier versus a veteran Fianna Fáiler with impeccable manners and recently acquired gravitas.

But Martin also faces a tricky dilemma: the longer Leo is draped in the power and authority of the Taoiseach’s office, the greater the risk to Micheál when he topples the Fine Gael-led government.

Can Fianna Fáil afford to let Varadkar mature in office until 2019, adding experience to his other assets? It is a judgment that will require the wisdom of Solomon, and timing will be the ultimate key to whether or not Martin will be the next taoiseach.

If he is seen to call a general election to fulfil a personal ambition, the country will punish his opportunism – and that would be only one element of Fine Gael’s portrayal of Martin as yesterday’s man.

Fianna Fáil’s message will use Varadkar’s youth and vigour as symptoms of his impetuous nature and contrast it with Martin as a mature and trustworthy statesman.

The Fine Gael leader will be portrayed as all talk and no trousers, a spoofer who sees an announcement as more important than the substance of what he announces.

If Fine Gael has more seats after an election, Martin is toast.

However, a new Fianna Fáil leader could not credibly renew the confidence-and-supply arrangement to support another Fine Gaelled government. Should Fianna Fáil win more seats than any other party, with whom could it share government if not Fine Gael? Sinn Féin?

Neither Varadkar nor Martin has a serious leadership rival now; both are clearly the most capable kingpins available to their parties.

Martin recently silenced whispers in the parliamentary party about the possibility of a coalition with Sinn Féin: he knows a pact with Sinn Féin would make Fianna Fáil anathema to middle-ground voters and hasten the party’s demise.

And if Martin falters in the next election, Fianna Fáil could spend 16 years in opposition before they get another opportunity to get into government in 2026.

A bad result would put an end to a long political career of two distinct parts: the forgettable early years and his remarkable renaissance as leader after the 2011 election.

Martin hauled Fianna Fáil back from its calamitous 17% share in that 2011 general election to running ahead of Fine Gael in recent opinion polls.

And he has consistently been the most popular leader with the public and his personal standing is way ahead of the party he leads.

The Fianna Fáil leader can fast-track or deny any of the legislation required to fulfil Varadkar’s political promises – in other words, Martin has a veto on the Government’s most popular initiatives.

He will also be hoping that Varadkar’s novelty value will dim as the annual trolley crisis paralyses hospitals through the winter and the housing emergency continues to dog the Government next year.

Governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them. And three-in-a row will be a tougher ambition for Fine Gael to fulfil in the next election than for Dublin in Croke Park today.

And if Martin does prevail and secures more seats than Fine Gael in the next election who would he ask to make up the numbers for government?

But then if Fianna Fáil emerges from the next election with more seats than any other party, Micheál Martin will be taoiseach – and he may be less fussy about who sits with Fianna Fáil on the government benches. NOW that George Hook is suspended, maybe Newstalk will defer its bar on journalists from the Irish Times appearing on its programmes. The alleged barring order followed columnist Fintan O’Toole’s boycott of the station after Hookie’s boorish utterances – and O’Toole’s expression of revulsion of the testosterone tint in Newstalk’s corporate culture.

If Newstalk bosses were so proactive in sanctioning critics after Hookie’s disgrace, how would they respond if a journalist criticised Denis O’Brien, the oligarch who underwrites their enormous losses?

I have not been invited to appear on Newstalk since I reported on the Moriarty tribunal’s criticism of Mr O’Brien – around the same time I was dropped as a presenter on Mr O’Brien’s other national radio station. WE CAN rely on English opera buffs to add vitriol to their highbrow insults, particularly commenting on rivals. In his diaries, the famous director Peter Hall, who died last week, wrote about a contemporary, Jonathan Miller: ‘He directs plays as if he were advancing a theory for the New York Review Of Books.’ Dr Miller’s response was less cerebral: ‘Peter Hall looks like a big ball of snot rolling around a barbershop floor.’ SARAH SMITH, BBC journalist and daughter of the late Labour Party leader John Smith, takes over the BBC’s prestigious Sunday Politics slot today from Andrew Neil. I’m told that Ms Smith’s former colleagues had a secret nickname for her ,‘Cod’, because she was such a cold fish.