ANALYSIS:Throughout the travails of recent days, the Fine Gael leader has neatly outfoxed his party rivals, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
ENDA KENNY’s leadership is hanging in the balance following the revolt of half his front bench. He will have to win the vote of confidence at his parliamentary party meeting tomorrow by a decisive margin to retain his position and lead his party into the next election.
Kenny has shown far more steel and ingenuity than his frontbench opponents anticipated and, to date, he has tactically outmanoeuvred them in a desperate fight to hold on to the leadership. His problem is that the wounds he has already suffered could make long-term survival impossible.
By contrast, Richard Bruton and his supporters have shown ineptitude in the timing of their move which has annoyed so many Fine Gael supporters. Their tactics were also inept. Concerted media leaks over the weekend from the Bruton camp flagging the heave gave Kenny time to prepare and he has caught his opponents on the hop at each turn by acting boldly and unexpectedly when he appeared to be cornered.
If he does win the vote at the parliamentary party, Kenny will have to persuade some of the younger frontbenchers who came out against him yesterday to come back and serve in his new team.
He made a strong pitch last night to win at least some of them over by pointing out that he had always put party unity to the forefront and had appointed his defeated leadership opponents in 2002 to senior positions in the party.
Having taken his opponents by surprise on Monday by sacking Richard Bruton, Kenny followed up with another decisive and unexpected move yesterday by refusing to go like a lamb to the slaughter to a frontbench meeting at which half of those present intended to tell him it was time to step down from the leadership.
He turned the tables on them by delivering a stinging 20-minute address during which he criticised Bruton’s recent performance as finance spokesman and said he had come to the conclusion that a plot had been hatched against him for months. He didn’t wait to hear what any of them had to say in response but instead effectively dissolved the old front bench yesterday and told them he will nominate a new one on Monday if he wins the vote of confidence.
By sidestepping the strategy of his frontbench opponents in attempting to force him to step down without a fight, he left them to try to recover the initiative by coming out as a group to publicly call on him to resign.
The spokesman for the frontbench group was Roscommon TD Denis Naughten. Making Naughten spokesman for the rebel group was an astute move as it helped to debunk the notion held by many of the leader’s rural supporters that the anti-Kenny heave was simply the brainchild of a few Dublin smart alecs.
It was clear that Naughten found the whole experience emotionally draining as he recalled that he had backed Kenny when he first ran for the leadership against Michael Noonan back in 2001 and had remained a loyal supporter until relatively recently.
He said that he had first told Kenny that he was not doing things right two years ago and had been expressing his concerns since then. Naughten’s basic point was that, while the leader had done a great job in bringing the party back from the brink of extinction after 2002, he was just not connecting with the public and had no prospect of doing so between now and the election.
The sombre mood among the frontbench rebels reflected the feelings of party TDs and Senators on both sides of the divide.
Sadness rather than bitterness was the prevailing emotion in the party yesterday. “Don’t mind that media nonsense about blood-letting. Most of us will have no problem about working together when this is over,” said one TD from the anti-Kenny camp who was having his lunch in the Dáil canteen with a strongly pro-Kenny colleague.
An experienced politician from another party observing Fine Gael colleagues in Leinster House remarked: “This is a polite argument at a tea party compared to the savagery of the heaves in Fianna Fáil during the Haughey era.”
In the past, the party has shown an ability to bounce back from divisive leadership heaves relatively quickly. It was British prime minister Harold Wilson who coined the phrase that a week is a long time in politics. While it is the most cruel of trades, as the past few days have demonstrated, it is also a trade where people put battles behind them quickly and move on in the pursuit of power.
Nonetheless, the emotional trauma of recent days will take some time to heal, regardless of who emerges as the leader when the dust has settled. There is fierce resentment in the anti-Kenny camp at the backroom team of advisers around the leader, and that is almost as strong a motivation as their belief that Kenny is not the ideal leader of the party.
On the other side, a number of experienced TDs are resentful of what they regard as a power grab by some of the younger and less experienced members of the front bench supported by the younger members of the parliamentary party.
Both sides were claiming last night that they had the numbers to win tomorrow’s battle but if there is one lesson from past heaves it is that lists of supporters are invariably wrong and sometimes wildly inaccurate.
A number will only show their hand tomorrow and, given that it is a secret ballot, some may not show their hand at all.
In Kenny’s favour is the fact that he has demonstrated political skill and a lot of guts over the past few days.
Against him is the prospect that a close vote might encourage some waverers into the Bruton camp in the hope of sorting out the leadership issue once and for all.