Timing is everything. Simon Coveney, one of Fine Gael's leaders-in-waiting, has lost status and been censored for having no ideological objections to sharing government with Fianna Fáil and for believing that Micheál Martin was "very competent". A limp mea culpa to the Labour Party – his favoured coalition partner – failed to placate Kathleen Lynch who went through him for a short cut. You don't mess with that Labour minister. Rounding on her Cork colleague, she accused him of "disloyalty", because her party had borne the brunt of public disapproval for cleaning up governmental messes created by Fine Gael. His motivation, she declared, involved leadership aspirations and early positioning, along with a determination to be re-elected in Cork North Central.
She started an avalanche. Within hours, his constituency colleague Jerry Buttimer appealed for traditionalist Fine Gael votes by insisting he wouldn't let Fianna Fáil back into government "in any shape or form". From there, the situation worsened. Leo Varadkar, a strong challenger for the leadership, dominated the headlines and hoovered up positive tributes by announcing he was gay. Mr Varadkar's views on a Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil alliance, delivered months earlier, were ignored.
But that was before Fine Gael support plummeted in December and the party stood to lose up to 30 seats. Mr Coveney's intervention, on the other hand, was driven by those polls as Fine Gael support fell to 19 per cent. Conducted before Christmas, it was held in reserve. At the time, there was barely concealed panic as TDs considered their re-election prospects, the leadership of Enda Kenny and the likely composition of the next government. Publication brought trouble.
Attitudes had altered dramatically with a recovery in Fine Gael's ratings. TDs hoped a recovering economy would save their seats. This was not the time for political coat-trailing, particularly as a banking inquiry would focus on Fianna Fáil's role in the economic collapse. Mr Coveney took additional punishment when Frances Fitzgerald, another leadership contender and director of election strategy, declared it was not in the party's interest to rehabilitate Fianna Fáil by promoting it as a coalition partner. Such activity, she observed, would make it more difficult to re-elect Fine Gael TDs. Appealing to the self-interest of those TDs was a low blow to Mr Coveney's ambition, but Mr Kenny, in far-away Davos, was said to approve.
This badly-timed exercise was not a serious leadership challenge: it amounted to what PJ Mara once described as “nibbling at my leader’s bum”. For all that, it has helped to clarify Fine Gael thinking, not only on the issue of leadership but in relation to a changing political landscape and the onward march of Sinn Féin.