Wasted potential: Obituary for the Varadkar Premiership

It is perhaps a small footnote in Irish electoral history, but Leo Varadkar entered Irish politics as a record setter. His first election, almost exactly 20 years ago, saw him topping the poll in the Castleknock Local Electoral Area as a first-time candidate, winning a literally unprecedented 38% of the vote and securing a still-record 4,894 first preferences. In a council election. This was in an era, it might be forgotten, when Fine Gael morale was at an all-time low: The party was two years removed from a humiliating defeat at the hands of Bertie Ahern, and still three years away from a third consecutive defeat inflicted by Ahern at the 2007 election.

In that election of 2007, Varadkar walked comfortably into a seat in Dublin West without as much as breaking a sweat, depriving socialist stalwart Joe Higgins of his place on the opposition benches. Alongside Lucinda Creighton, his election, on an otherwise disappointing day for Fine Gael, was a bright spot. From the very beginning, hungry Fine Gael eyes looked at Leo Varadkar and thought “this guy is a votewinner”.

Ultimately, there is no further explanation needed for his rise to the Taoiseach’s office. It was cemented, on that 2004 day in Castleknock when a young man with migrant heritage set a political record, and Fine Gael saw its future. His decision to come out as a gay man before the marriage referendum of 2015 may not have been politically motivated, but it certainly didn’t hurt: To Fine Gaelers, Varadkar may have had many merits, but as a vote-winning totem of the new Ireland, he was always going to be somebody the party turned to, eventually, when it needed leadership.

It’s worth pausing to consider at this point how this must all have felt from Varadkar’s point of view: I will not pretend to have known him well, or having been his friend, but know him a little bit I did, back then. He was a quiet, shy, and bookish sort of fellow who thought endlessly about politics and policy. If he had other hobbies or interests, they were well hidden. Fine Gael was both his professional, and social life. Like many of us, he was ambitious, which is no sin.

Unlike many of us, he was given an opportunity that few are: In his thirties, in the absolute prime of his life, he was granted the most supremely powerful political office in the land. This award of power came with something else: Immense goodwill from the media and official Ireland, who, even if they did not love his politics, certainly loved the idea of Varadkar’s Ireland as the sort of diverse and tolerant place where a man of his background could become our leader. He inherited a stable Government, and a party united behind his leadership. The levers of state power were his to command.

What did he do with them?

That, were I Leo Varadkar, would be a question that would haunt me to my grave.

In the earliest days of his Premiership, he hosted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Dublin, and showed off a new fondness – borrowed from Trudeau – for exotic socks. The media swooned. In the era of Donald Trump, here was a hopeful, uplifting, progressive contrast to what the Washington Post describes indirectly as “darkness”.

Ultimately – and I’m no psychiatrist, but I’m not sure you have to be – Varadkar seemed to fall in love with this image of himself. This is partly understandable: The quiet, bookish, nerdy fellow suddenly becomes the cool kid, applauded and admired by the trendiest voices on the Dublin “scene”. From being a youthful opponent of progressive, liberal Ireland, he was suddenly a totem and an icon of progressive, liberal Ireland. When people who’ve spent their lives disliking you suddenly become your fans, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the new adulation might be addictive. Like many converts, he became something of a zealot: The Thatcherite conservatism of his youth was replaced lock, stock, and barrel with ideas that ensured his popularity with progressives. He converted his views on abortion; he toned down his old hostility to NGOs and “quangos”; in the aftermath of 2016, with Trump and Brexit, he seemed to embrace his role as a progressive counterbalance to the new right, and paint himself as a champion of progressivism, the European Union, and the soft left.

Ultimately, what he didn’t recognise was that he was becoming a champion of the very system that he was supposed to be master of.

He is not unique in that: Many politicians undergo that journey. Elected to change the system and defend the public from its excesses, they end their career on the opposite side: They befriend civil servants and powerbrokers, they start seeing things from the point of view of the insider, and by the end, they’re defending the system from the excesses of the public, and warning about extremism and dangerous ideas, and, of course, “the far right”. Ironically, of course, in the earliest days of his career, Varadkar was regarded as just about as “far right” as you’d get, in Ireland.

And so I wonder, twenty years from now, when he looks back on his life, what will Varadkar make of it all? He was given a chance hundreds if not thousands would give their right arm for: The chance to change his country and leave it better off by implementing his own ideas. Did he, in the end, implement his own ideas? I’m not sure he did. Even once.

He leaves behind a bloated and sprawling state sector, a Government fighting crises in housing, healthcare, immigration, crime, and legitimacy. In his defence, he leaves the national balance sheet in a decent place, but that’s about as much as one could say. If the Leo Varadkar of 2004 could look at the Leo Varadkar of 2024, I think it perfectly fair – even if perhaps slightly harsh – to ask whether he would even recognise himself.

Varadkar, it should be said, is not a bad, or an evil man. It was hard not to be moved by his evident emotion, today, when he spoke about his colleagues and how he feels he is not the one to help them save their jobs. Whatever else he is, that he is Fine Gael through and through is not in dispute. He is also, it should be said, very well-liked by those who work for him, which says a lot for his character.

Nor should it be in dispute though that what Fine Gaelers thought they were getting is not what they ultimately got. They thought they were getting a generational vote-winner; an answer to Bertie Ahern; somebody who would dominate the political and intellectual landscape of the country for several decades in the manner of a Haughey or a Fitzgerald. What they got was, I’d suggest, an ultimately disappointing political career, one that has ended in failure decades ahead of its time.

The ultimate judgment on any politician can be rendered by asking just one question: Did they leave the country in a better place, and a better state, than they found it? Some people out there will be tasked with arguing that Mr. Varadkar did. I do not envy them the job.

Ultimately, the Taoiseach for people who get up early in the morning scheduled his own resignation for noon. That might be an unfair metaphor for his career, but it’s not an inapt one.