Great leaders can see around corners. Leo’s not one of them

SOME way to treat your best friend. The British are having a nervous breakdown and all Leo Varadkar can do is punch them in the solar plexus as they wrestle with an existential crisis that is, admittedly, entirely of their making. It’s like as if the entire British nation has succumbed to late-stage Alzheimer’s where they have a perfect recall of simpler, grander times when they ruled the world as an empire and have no recollection at all of their changed circumstances as a second-rung economy falling down the pecking order.

However, it’s no help to them that the leader of Ireland, with whom they share their only land border, should be so unsympathetic and politically cold-hearted at a time when they could do with a friendly arm around the shoulder.

After Theresa May suffered the largest parliamentary defeat in British history, with a whopping 230-vote defeat on her Brexit plan, Taoiseach Varadkar couldn’t resist putting the boot in.

He told them that the mess they now found themselves in was down to them and only they could sort it out.

As well as unsympathetic, this could be Leo Varadkar at his selfmaiming best. It was entirely gratuitous and utterly avoidable. Car-crash diplomacy.

The risk for Ireland now is that Britian will feel even more isolated than before and will look inwards for a solution. If that happens we might as well start the groundworks straight away for those checkpoints on the border with Northern Ireland.

Life is what you find it, not what you’d like it to be.

So while our ambition was to have no checkpoints at all on the border, it was never either achievable or desireable to cut Northern Ireland off from the rest of the UK which that objective would require.

Surely, after 30 years of murder and mayhem and the worsening of community relations in the North we should have resisted the temptation to attempt to persuade the British into concessions they simply could not deliver.

From wanting an invisible border we may now end up with the polar opposite – physical infrastructures on the ground, together with the consequent massive political, community and economic disruption.

Rather than offering a deal to the British that they could live with – which in turn would mean minimal border checks – Leo Varadkar insisted on playing the zero-sum game. He wanted it all.

In taking that approach he simply asked too much. It was a strategy which has now led to the deal being rejected by the Commons and a hard Brexit and tough border checks looming large as a more than likely probability.

The only thing that will save Leo Varadkar’s blushes at this stage is for the UK to hold another referendum and scrap the entire Brexit misadventure. Even then, the damage done to relations between Ire- land and Britain – not to mention the tensions that have now arisen in the North and between north and south – will remain as a reminder of the failure of Irish diplomacy.

The Taoiseach’s hardgreen posture now threatens our enormous €25billion annual trade with the UK, which has been growing consistently for five years – as well as our essential €39billion of imports from Britain. Putting so much at risk in pursuit of an unachievable objective underscores Leo Varadkar’s political naivety. His public posturing, his lack of diplomacy – his downright unfriendliness – reflects badly on him. And puts the political and financial well- being of Ireland at serious risk.

There is something not quite right about Leo Varadkar. The depth of personality, the resilience and fortitude required of leaders at times of crises, are absent.

His judgement is dodgy to say the least.

How else would you account for him, by his behaviour, endorsing a manifestly sexist, anti-woman protocol during a visit to a temple from which women were banned in Ethiopia?

Leaders are required to consider consequences. The best of them see around corners.

Taking the hard line with the UK on Brexit will have its aftermath and potentially enormous penalties that the rest of us could be paying for generations.

CHANCES are, you can say what you like to the judge and whether it’s a lie or not there’ll be no comeback. Our perjury law is in rag order.

People who intentionally or recklessly tell lies in court should face the consequences. The reality is, however, that they don’t. This is especially true in personal injury cases. This week we heard that one family is under investigation for involvement in a series of staged road-traffic collisions, involving a total of 45 personal injury claims worth over €1million.

Chances are, however, that nothing will come of it – certainly not in terms of perjury.

The law is effectively as dead as a dodo in that regard. And everybody, including judges, lawyers and lawmakers know that.