Nothing in his political life more became him than his leaving of it. The career of Leo Varadkar has ended with all the undignified and unprincipled self-indulgence with which he had conducted it, even remaining as Taoiseach when logic and decency should have caused him to step down and hand the reins of power to the Tánaiste Micheal Martin. A more principled Taoiseach than Varadkar – Charlie Haughey, say – would have immediately resigned after the humiliating defeat of his attempt to eliminate any constitutional or biological link between womanhood and motherhood. Moreover, he had some more headlines to garner, a little scolding to administer to President Biden, before he unveiled his definitive interpretation of the term “durable relationship”.
But had he not already done that with his very public deep-throated kiss of a young man who was not his partner at a night-club in 2022? Naturally, though widely seen on social media, no newspaper has acknowledged the existence of this prolonged kiss, and any historian wanting to get a sense of these times would in vain scan the archives of, say, The Irish Times, the “newspaper of record” looking for a single reference to it. Officially, this kiss did not exist, just as the British newspapers of 1938 refused to acknowledge the existence of a certain Mrs Simpson until the secret became impossible conceal. Yet in 2024, even though there could hardly have been a single elector during the recent referendum campaign who was unaware of that kiss, The Irish Times assessment of his career this week made no mention of it, though it offers a clear insight into what value Varadkar placed on the term “durable relationship”.
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