Leo Varadkar wanted to be taoiseach from the age of eight, his new memoir, Speaking My Mind, reveals.
Varadkar’s political ambitions started young, when he helped his mother to push her vote into the ballot box in the 1987 general election – thinking it was “magical” that the act of voting could transform “ordinary people into leaders”.
And he wanted to be one. He loved the idea of being on TV, or in the Dáil, even if the “thought of knocking on doors and engaging with strangers was scary”. Looking back, he says, he accepts the early obsession was “a little… eccentric”.
The interest was encouraged by his parents, who allowed him stay up late to watch RTÉ’s Today Tonight current affairs programme.
“Sometimes, I’d even catch Radio Sweden’s English-language news, I always wanted to understand what the world looked like to people beyond our little island,” he writes.
But what does his anticipated memoir tell us about him and his time in office?
Resignation
Varadkar is convinced he stepped down as taoiseach at the right time, and for the right reasons.
Outside of family and his closest advisers, Fine Gael deputy leader Simon Coveney was the first to be told of his decision, in March 2024. The Corkman was taken aback and tried to change the party leader’s mind.
Coveney was worried the move could prompt an unwanted snap general election, or leave the Dáil facing the unprecedented job of electing a taoiseach for a third time.
[ Leo Varadkar: A political life in pictures Opens in new window ]
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin would not seek to run to the country, Varadkar told him, or take advantage of turbulence inside Fine Gael, or be seen to do so: “He’s far too decent, and too cautious.” Martin “fretted” when he was told.
However, the Green Party’s Eamon Ryan was pleased, telling him his decision to go “was a good thing” for him. “You won’t be far behind me,” Varadkar thought, but he kept it to himself.
He briefly wobbled the morning after, when Coveney again tried to persuade him to stay, telling him that he was “not a busted flush” and “that every day is a bonus when you’re at the top”.
Fine Gael ministers reacted differently. Helen McEntee “looked genuinely upset”; Paschal Donohoe “seemed let down”; while Simon Harris looked like a ghost, partly because he realised “he could be taoiseach without a few weeks”.
First time as minister
In 2010, Varadkar had been on tenterhooks, wondering whether he would get a cabinet job from Enda Kenny. In the end, he missed the call that brought him into the ministerial ranks, and he had to call Government Buildings back.
Initially, he was given the Department of Transport and Tourism. Sport was added to his duties hurriedly the following day – though Varadkar himself admits he knows little about sport of any kind.
Kenny often gave good advice, especially after Varadkar criticised former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in 2010, accusing the elder statesman of having tripled the national debt and effectively destroying the country.
His words went down badly within Fine Gael, and today Varadkar says if there were any “twenty seconds in my political career that I could delete”, then it would be those Dáil words.
Glad he had written to Fitzgerald to apologise, Kenny complimented Varadkar, saying: “If anything like that ever happens again, put your hands up and own it.” It was good advice, Varadkar says now.
Varadkar says relations with his junior ministers then were spiky – Labour’s Alan Kelly and Fine Gael’s Michael Ring. Kelly is one of the few people who could be regarded as more arrogant than himself, he says.
Ring’s ego is huge, often insisting on rows, with frequent threats of resignation: “On one occasion, everyone stifled their laughter when Michael threatened to storm off and I offered to help him pack.”
The 2010 heave against Enda Kenny
Everyone knew the 2010 coup against Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael leadership was not a model of the Machiavellian arts, but Varadkar captures its sheer ineptness, even if he is quick to say that he “wasn’t at the centre of it”.
“Gradually, without even a semblance of a coherent plan, a coup began to form,” he says, pointing out that the challenge came most from “Fine Gael bluebloods”, who had known Kenny and his father Henry before them.
Then everybody dithered, with nobody nailing down support. In one Leinster House meeting, he remembers Paschal Donohoe in tears: “He wanted to do the right thing and not hurt anyone, which was clearly impossible,” Varadkar records.
Plans for a secret cabal in the Green Isle Hotel descended into chaos when the media found out about it, with some involved trying to escape out the back door, while others faced the microphone of RTÉ journalist Valerie Cox.
Eventually Varadkar sought advice from Fine Gael’s serving and old heads, Michael Noonan and Ivan Yates. “They pointed out things which I had naively failed to consider,” he writes.
Most TDs would think about themselves, the two said. If one Fine Gael TD in a constituency backed Kenny, they told him, the other would back rival Richard Bruton, because both could not be ministers.
The UK relationship
Varadkar had met Boris Johnson in 2012, when he was mayor of London, and thought him odd. His opinion did not improve. Johnson only voted not to quit the European Union without a deal after prime minister Theresa May had offered to resign.
“This was an act of self-sacrifice on her part, while Boris’s position said a lot about his character,” he writes. In the end, it was her “lack of ruthlessness” that led to the end of her premiership. All of this led to Dublin having to deal with the “less principled” Johnson.
Phil Hogan and Golfgate
Without putting too fine a point on it, Varadkar and former Fine Gael minister and parliamentary colleague Phil Hogan are enemies.
Throughout, Varadkar talks about how damaged relationships with people were eventually repaired – with one exception, that with Phil Hogan. If anything, his irritation with the former European commissioner has grown.
Hogan believes he was betrayed by Varadkar after the Golfgate controversy during the Covid pandemic in 2020 – a highly controversial dinner attended by well-known faces amid lockdown restrictions. Hogan believed he would not have lost his position as trade commissioner, as a result of the controversy, if Varadkar had stood firm.
Varadkar has little sympathy. “Phil could have made a full, unequivocal apology. He could have begged for mercy, explaining that he lived in Brussels and didn’t know the Irish rules,” he writes.
“Instead, he sought to blame the organisers and the Irish Hotels Federation. Then he returned to Brussels, leaving the rest of us to deal with the fall-out,” he recalls, adding that Hogan made matters worse with an RTÉ interview.
By then it was known that he had been stopped by a garda for using a mobile phone while driving: “(He) groused that the garda wouldn’t have stopped him if he’d known who he was.
“Sheesh! I hadn’t heard talk like that since a previous EU commissioner, Pee Flynn did the Late Late Show in 1999 and justified his large salary on grounds of needing to maintain three houses, cars and housekeeper,” he writes.
When he sought the Fine Gael leadership, he remembered Hogan – by then in Brussels as European commissioner for agriculture and rural development – called him to offer his support.
“I knew he hoped for a second term, and I imagine he calculated that supporting me would make that more likely. This, of course, was never explicitly discussed, or promised. In politics, so much is explicit.”
Nigel Farage is surprisingly good company
In 2018, Varadkar met Nigel Farage after the Brexiteer had berated him in the European Parliament for a speech during the height of the Brexit crisis, one given in four languages – English, German, French and Irish, he says, with just a touch of pride.
Having accused him of trying to scupper the democratic outcome of a United Kingdom referendum, and of being a European unionist, Farage later shared a glass of champagne with him.
“He was jovial and chatty,” recalls Varadkar, remembering that Farage spoke of how much he loved Ireland. In turn, Varadkar spoke of how much he liked England. “Really,” he said, “You’d never guess.”
While all of this was going on, Varadkar’s press officer was desperately trying to ensure no picture of the two was taken. It is annoying, he says, “how often political demagogues and populists are such good company”.