I often wonder what it must be like to be Leo Varadkar, aged just 46, with the highlights of your career long in the rear-view mirror. The only analogy I can draw that really works is to the sporting pundit who was once a former and beloved player: Think Thierry Henry, or closer to home, Roy Keane. They made their names playing the game, and now they get a little bit of recognition for talking about the game.
But – if I am to be harsh – at least those guys generally have accomplished something. If you’ve reached the exalted heights of punditry on Sky Sports, you likely have a World Cup or a Champion’s League or a few Premier League titles sitting on the mantlepiece at home. You will have been an extraordinary player, rather than an ordinary one. There’s a reason why Keane and Gary Neville and Paul Scholes all have television gigs, while Nicky Butt runs a pub somewhere, or whatever he does.
And the true greats? They don’t bother with punditry at all. There’s a reason why you never saw Charles Haughey pontificating on his successors from the pages of the Sunday Independent. Bertie doesn’t much bother with it, either. Nor, I suspect, will Lionel Messi.
But there’s another difference too: You can tell with the footballers that they enjoyed playing, and that they miss playing. With Varadkar, there is no sense that he misses being Taoiseach. It is much more as though he has returned to punditry as his preferred and natural activity.
He is also, I would argue, a much better pundit than he ever was as Taoiseach. Here he is in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
President Trump’s election in November generated a wave of optimism among those who shared his ideology, a curious mix of nativism, economic nationalism, traditional values and authoritarianism. “I told you so,” they said.
Secret supporters came out of the woodwork, emboldened by what they thought would herald a wave of similar election results across the western world. ‘’A return to common sense,” one said to me. “The end of woke,” proclaimed another. I worried that they were right. Five months later, I am more optimistic.
Trump’s shoddy treatment of America’s allies has unfooted his admirers, and the reality of seeing people deported, student activists disappeared, budgets cut, tariffs imposed and personal rights removed by executive order has some people wondering whether liberal democracy really was so bad after all. I think two upcoming elections that should be closely watched are Canada and Australia.
A few weeks ago, Canada’s Conservative party was heading for a massive victory led by the populist Pierre Poilievre. His slogan is familiar: “Canada first, Canada last, Canada always.” Today, under its new leader, Mark Carney — a former governor of the Bank of England who is not an MP and until recently was an Irish citizen — the centre-left Liberal Party has a reasonable chance of winning another victory. Carney was unknown to most Canadians only a year ago. Yes, after nine years Canadians had grown tired of Justin Trudeau, but it is hard not to conclude that Trump’s aggression towards Canada is the main reason for this dramatic shift in public opinion.
Varadkar’s broad thesis is this: That Trump might be successful at home (in political terms) but that he is undermining support for similar movements around the world by setting Trumpism up in opposition to those countries. When he is declaring economic war on Canada, for example, it becomes much harder for patriotic Canadians to be associated with him, and therefore the support for those perceived to be associated with him drops. He points to the Canadian elections on April 28th, and the Australian elections on May 3rd, as litmus tests for his thesis. Both countries have seen rapid reversals in the polls for populist challengers, and strong shift back towards progressive liberal incumbent governments, since the American President took office and started his trade war with the world.
As it happens, I think Varadkar is correct about that, though his mistake is to conflate a band-aid with the solution.
The central problem in the west remains, regardless of the global popularity or otherwise of Donald Trump: That the conditions which have given rise to populism are likely to remain for the foreseeable future precisely because politicians like Leo Varadkar did nothing to address them and have no solutions to address them moving forward. We see this in the opinion polls in Ireland: The Government, while remaining the most popular of the choices available to the public, nevertheless has an approval rating in the thirties. Progressive liberalism is being saved in Ireland not because of its inherent popularity, but because nobody has been able to put together a coherent political alternative to it. That situation will not last forever.
What’s interesting about Varadkar’s article – and you should read it all if you can – is the extent to which he sees Irish politics as not really being connected to the actions of Irish politicians. For example:
Something similar happened in November 2022. My party got a mini-boost in the polls. Some put it down to a generous budget; others to the impending change of taoiseach, in which Michéal Martin would step down and I would return to the office. I was more sceptical.
Across the water, the United Kingdom was experiencing an economic meltdown as markets balked at Liz Truss’s expansionary budget, forcing her resignation after only 45 days in office. A year later, an even more generous budget here produced no bounce in the polls, much to the disappointment of many of my colleagues. My thesis was that the bounce we got was due to Truss.
For a fleeting moment, people had realised what competent government looked like and remembered what misgovernment felt like. I asked another data-driven politician, Paschal Donohoe, what he thought. He confirmed my thesis. “What happens in UK politics is the background music for everything that happens here,” he said. Harold Macmillan had put it more succinctly — “events, dear boy, events”.
That’s a fascinating thing to believe, is it not? That Irish voters judge their Government not on its own actions, but on how well or poorly Ireland is doing by comparison to the United Kingdom.
The fact that he believes that explains a lot about his time in office, which was marked by the lowest ebb in UK-Irish relations since the Falklands War. It also, I would argue, explains a lot of his inaction and inactivity as Taoiseach. If you believe that solving Ireland’s problems has less of an impact on your support at home than looking better than Liz Truss does, then why would you bother?
This laconic, laid back, inherently lazy approach to public office will forever define him, in my mind. But then, there’s a scarier proposition: What if, in the end, he’s right?