An almost accidental leadership challenge lost any hope of success once it was perceived as Brahmins versus yokels
FROM THE moment he was asked by Miriam O’Callaghan if he had confidence in his leader, Richard Bruton’s eyes started blinking rapidly.
It was a combination of intense concentration and the nerves that come from being on live TV.
He was a guest on RTÉ's Prime Timelast Thursday week. He was there to discuss the two banking reports published that day. But as it happened, a new opinion poll for The Irish Timesbrought bad news for Fine Gael.
Support for the party had dropped to below that for Labour and party leader Enda Kenny’s satisfaction ratings were at 24 per cent, only hovering above those of Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
Did he have confidence in the leader? O’Callaghan asked. He evaded the question but she came back again.
“It’s not about me,” he said.
“It’s a straight yes or no,” retorted O’Callaghan.
“I am just as much in the dock in terms of Fine Gael’s failings. We are all in the dock. We have to look at our performances,” Bruton responded.
By omission, it was a statement of no confidence in his own leader. And unsurprisingly, it immediately triggered a chain of events that would end with a battle for the soul of the party.
It would also cruelly expose the myth that the Kenny leadership had somehow managed to bring peace to the party, had ended the “family at war” slur for once and for all. Once again, Fine Gael would split down the middle over who was best placed to lead.
Was it planned? The straight answer is no. There was no campaign team lined up behind Bruton. Indeed it took until well into the following week before the dissenters grouped together effectively. His supporters also say that he had not discussed the matter with them beforehand.
Bruton might have given it some thought before appearing on air. But his tentative and slightly nervous reply suggested that he was slightly caught on the hop.
While it was not planned, it had been brewing a while. There had been “mutterings” about Kenny for months. The George Lee debacle in February had brought the tensions to the surface. A number of ambitious young frontbenchers – Simon Coveney and Brian Hayes in particular – wanted Kenny out. Over a weekend, soundings were taken about Bruton as a replacement. But in the end he refused to move.
Later on Thursday night, Bruton appeared on TV3 and was harangued by Vincent Browne. He gave a watery endorsement of Kenny, admitted his own leadership ambitions.
“In the swag bag of every corporal is a lieutenant’s baton,” he said.
A more appropriate quote might have been the one that was coined after Michael Heseltine’s doomed challenge to Margaret Thatcher two decades ago.
“He who wields the dagger seldom wears the crown.”
Bruton’s mutinous comments triggered an almost accidental campaign against Kenny’s leadership. But it was slow to gather cohesion or form. That ill-preparedness was to prove fatal for dissenters.
For Kenny’s supporters, the genie was out of the bottle. They were aware of “uisce faoi thalamh” for some months and had a contingency plan in place in the event of a heave.
“Once we heard Richard Bruton’s comment, we immediately swung into action. There had been mutterings,” said Phil Hogan who headed the campaign.
The Kilkenny deputy is a tall physically imposing man with an almost permanent Cheshire cat grin. He also has a big reputation for his ability at spin, strategy and occasional deployment of the black arts. In public he has all the confidence and swagger of a vaudeville showman. Hogan also divides opinion within the party. There is no love lost between him and his fiercest detractors.
Over the course of the next 24 hours, dissenters disclosed that Kenny would face a challenge but would not reveal what form it would take. Kenny was advised to force the issue, to flush out where Bruton stood. He phoned Bruton on Saturday and demanded a pledge of loyalty.
When none came, the battle lines were drawn. James Reilly, party whip Paul Kehoe and Sen Paddy Burke from Castlebar came quickly on board. The party’s publicity director Ciarán Conlon abandoned a Four Peaks Challenge to return to Mount Street on Saturday. One of Kenny’s key advisers Mark Kennelly was also called in.
With so much of the party’s apparatus focused on the leadership battle, it was left to three officials – Michael McLoughlin, Andrew McDowell and Seán Faughnan – to keep the ordinary business of politics going.
That, of course, paradoxically included Enda Kenny’s motion of no confidence in Brian Cowen, which was totally eclipsed.
Events unfolded quickly. Following his conversation with Kenny, Bruton phoned the front bench and informed them of what happened with many pledging support. Some of his senior supporters briefed Sunday newspapers about the impending challenge to Kenny’s leadership. They knew at least half of the front bench were on side and thought this would force Kenny out.
Kenny, who was at home in Castlebar for the weekend, drove to Dublin on Sunday morning, and had a long meeting with Bruton, who asked him to stand down as he could no longer carry his own front bench. Bruton’s team was heavily reliant on its young turks – Hayes, Coveney and Leo Varadkar – but the most effective operator was the former army officer Billy Timmins. Foot soldiers such as Lucinda Creighton, Sen John Paul Phelan, Damien English, Paul Bradford and John Deasy (who had a very good handle on the numbers) did a lot of the graft with backbenchers.
Both sides knew that they could command the support of a potential 30 of the 70 with a dozen or so waverers on either side. But the dissenters were already putting themselves at a disadvantage. They decided the “Alamo” would be the front bench. Until then his supporters were told to maintain a Trappist silence.
It was to prove a huge miscalculation. The Kenny side cranked out statements of support over the next 48 hours and flooded the airwaves. They also reached out to the backbenches. By contrast, Bruton’s camp did not begin to truly canvass backbenchers until Tuesday. By that time the image of a palace coup by the party’s Brahmins without reference to the backbench yokels had taken grip. A few notions took root. That it was urban versus rural. That it was boarding school versus rural techs. That it was young versus old. There was an element of truth in it. But at the same time, almost half the Dublin parliamentarians backed Kenny in the end.
The other difficulty for Bruton was that he had not prepared for the scale of the challenge he faced. His wizardry at his brief was not matched by flesh-pressing skills. “The problem was that though he was a decent fellow, Richard did not have any real relationship with some of the frontbench supporters. He had never held a conversation with them so there was a tenuous base for a cohesive campaign.
“Enda Kenny would have been in some of their constituencies 20 times, doing the chicken dinner circuit and parish halls. He knew some of his main rival’s supporters much more than Richard did.” “Dignified” was a word used by Bruton’s camp in the run-up to what they thought would be the fateful Tuesday shadow cabinet meeting. Unfortunately, for them that word was not in Hogan’s lexicon. Kenny’s team took a decision to sabotage the campaign. It was blunt and ruthless. But wholly effective.
Bruton was sacked. Kenny tabled a motion of confidence in himself. Unlike a motion of no confidence tabled by Bruton, the motion of confidence allowed Kenny have the final word and control of the meeting, which he used to great effect on Thursday. And he thwarted the desire of the refuseniks on Tuesday by shutting the meeting down before they had a chance to have their spake.
“Frontbench people who thought we were going to listen to nine long speeches of crocodile tears at the Tuesday meeting miscalculated the power that a chairman of a meeting has to terminate the meeting. That was a master stroke,” said Hogan.
“They expected that Enda Kenny would fold. They miscalculated the resistance and I suppose the determination.
“Bruton’s camp were going to go for the motion of no confidence if he didn’t step down at the meeting. Kenny wheeled the scrum by putting the motion of confidence in himself,” said Hogan.
They calculated that the timing of the heave and the perceived arrogance of some of the main dissenters would play into their hands. Ambition without experience, was how Kennyites put it.
This was acknowledged by one of their supporters. “They came out talking about themselves and their careers and all that patrician stuff. It didn’t wash. They turned out to be not that political in their thinking.”
Events turned on Wednesday. The dissenters had a good day. They used astute timing in announcing two key catches, Kieran O’Donnell (to the fury of Kennyites) and frontbencher Charlie Flanagan. They also employed a PR specialist, Breda Brown of Unique Media.
There was a shift of momentum that was gathering speed. In perhaps his strongest intervention, Hogan hastily assembled 20 other Kenny supporters and paraded them out to the plinth just before 6pm. It was an impressive show of strength. Hogan hyped it up, claimed that Kenny would win by a big margin. The claim did not stand up to scrutiny. But it stemmed an ebbing tide.
At 7 o’clock that evening, the Kenny side was confident that they had the numbers. At this stage, its campaign was unrelenting and there’s evidence that that intensity was not matched by the Bruton side. There were waverers – Deirdre Clune, Noel Coonan, Seymour Crawford, Fidelma Healy Eames, Paul Coghlan and Terence Flanagan – who found themselves under enormous pressure from both sides.
The meeting itself was dominated by Kenny supporters. The consensus on the strongest speeches – Alan Shatter, Gay Mitchell, Ciarán Cannon, and Bernard Durkan – all came from the Kenny side. That was partly because the detractors had to temper their criticism of Kenny and were not able to reach the same emotional pitch. Before the meeting Kenny was seen rehearsing from a script.
The preparation paid off. He delivered the speech of his life though his “trenchant” criticism of some opponents will leave a residue of bitterness. He name-checked a number of his former front bench and settled scores with them. The overall absence of rancour at the meeting does not mean an absence of rancour within Fine Gael.
The other factor – agreed by both sides – that aided Kenny’s cause enormously was the decision not to announce the actual result. The received wisdom was that a narrow victory would be almost as damaging as a loss and Kenny’s camp seemed to be taking a big gamble with its claim that the victory margin would be 10 (not likely, by any calculation)
In the event, the decision taken not to reveal numbers closed down that debate. And got everybody talking about a fully united party.
For the moment, at least.
In what may be a telling observation of history repeating itself, Alan Shatter congratulated Paul Kehoe for having lost his virginity when it comes to Fine Gael leadership heaves.
