Gary Murphy
The epigraph to Leo Varadkar’s memoir Speaking My Mind features lines from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 “The Man in the Arena” speech. Speaking at the Sorbonne, Roosevelt declared that “it is not the critic who counts”; rather, “the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
The former Irish taoiseach clearly sees himself as a man of action in the Roosevelt mode – one who, although precociously bright, entered public life not for strictly intellectual fulfilment but to make people’s lives better. Varadkar, like Roosevelt, acquired national leadership at a young age: he was made taoiseach at 38. After a quick jaunt through his middle-class childhood, the meat of his memoir brings us through a career highlighted by his two terms leading Ireland and Fine Gael from 2017, until his shock resignation last year, at the height of his powers.
In his late teens at Trinity College Dublin, Varadkar decides that the pedestrian life of a family GP, where he would succeed to his Indian father’s practice – as everyone in his life, including himself, has presumed will be the case – is ultimately not for him. Instead, fascinated by politics since childhood, he resolves that he will be the one whose face will be marred by dust and sweat and blood.
Also like Roosevelt, Varadkar possesses a certain charisma, a can-do attitude, and a very high opinion of himself. When the House of Commons approved the Brexit withdrawal agreement in December 2019, Varadkar writes of knowing that he was a “consequential taoiseach” who had earned his place in the history books. In fact, his obsession with being taoiseach runs through every page of this memoir. According to himself, he had passed the test, stood up to the pressure and protected Ireland’s interests, making decisions that mattered and which changed his country’s course for the better.
This is true, and on issues such as the abortion referendum of 2018, the battle against Covid, and, overwhelmingly, Brexit, Varadkar proved a leader of substance. But if Roosevelt’s arena was the place of the valiant, Varadkar’s seems strangely subdued. He writes of how he has often been accused by his critics of being cold and even lacking in empathy. He declares it’s not true; it’s just that he’s understated and reserved.
And yet it’s that reserve which ultimately damns this book. The only edge to his obviously happy personal life is when, on the verge of becoming taoiseach for the second time in December 2022, he admits to briefly kissing a man in a gay bar in front of his partner, who doesn’t seem one bit bothered by it. He is relieved that it does not, at the time, become a public story – not for himself but for the man he kissed.
But otherwise, there’s a strange lack of passion in the telling of his coming out as a gay man or in his fears and aspirations about being gay in the Ireland he grew up in. His experience as the child of an Indian immigrant father is also muted in the telling. Politically, Varadkar runs through all the main events that ultimately bring him to the taoiseach’s office, but they are told in such a robotic way that it is hard to care. He introduces subjects, writes a few lines, and leaves them hanging to go somewhere else, as if he too is somewhat bored by it all.
Varadkar is a shrewd and witty observer of those he comes across, but retains a painful lack of self-awareness. He has, unsurprisingly, little love for the leadership of the Conservative party who inflicted Brexit on his every waking moment. He observes David Cameron to be a likeable, capable politician who “would forever be the poster boy for the hubris that so often anticipates a fall.” And yet he doesn’t see hubris as an issue for himself. He characterises Michael Gove as a bit odd but does not see any oddness in himself either.
Of Nigel Farage, he writes: “It’s annoying how often political demagogues and populists are such good company!” On meeting Theresa May for the first time, he’s like a schoolboy fascinated by how quickly he can get from Dublin to Downing Street thanks to “a military jet and outriders”. But his wonderment turns to bitterness as he fights Ireland’s corner in interminable Brexit negotiations. When the withdrawal agreement of November 2018 is announced as “Theresa May’s deal”, he complains to his partner Matt that it was as much his deal or Europe’s as hers.
That might be fair enough, but it forms a consistent pattern of Varadkar framing political successes as very much his, while the failures are cumulative responsibilities. He writes of “my success” in the Brexit Wirral deal of October 2019 but plaintively laments that his party Fine Gael had a terrible election in February 2020. Much of Varadkar’s angst and exasperation about Brexit is reserved for Boris Johnson, with whom he has a rapport but whom he does not trust. But such a pattern suggests that Varadkar has many of Johnson’s traits.
Varadkar suspects he’s under surveillance from the British during the Brexit talks and resolves that everything that was said in private would also be said in public. But what about internal Irish disagreements? Of these Varadkar says nothing. He’s ultimately beaten down by Brexit, complaining that when the Windsor agreement of February 2023 is finalised, “it didn’t even lead the news. People weren’t that interested in Brexit any more.” But the crucial point which he misses is that Irish people were simply not that interested in the minutiae of Brexit, and it never featured in the one election he fought as taoiseach in February 2020.
That election is a disaster for him. Fine Gael’s poll numbers plummet during the campaign; but never fear, our hero pulls it “out of the bag” in the last television leaders’ debate, and an exit poll shows Fine Gael neck and neck with Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil. (The fact that Fine Gael had lost 15 percentage points from 2011 to 2020, during which Varadkar was a minister and then taoiseach, is not commented upon.)
Then comes the historic coalition government with Fianna Fáil and the Greens. But Varadkar’s second term as taoiseach is an unhappy one, and he writes of every day being “a little more taoiseach, a little less me”. His resignation from office just months before a general election shocks the Irish political world, but is a great relief to the man himself who had become increasingly disenchanted with public life and wanted a private one back.
Varadkar will always have a place in the history books. He was Ireland’s first gay taoiseach, and his immigrant backstory gives real hope to the myriad immigrants who have made Ireland their home. He did labour heroically on Brexit and led Ireland through the first wave of the Covid pandemic. But the self-congratulatory tone and underwhelming nature of this memoir won’t be of much enjoyment to readers, and certainly won’t make it of use to Ireland’s historians.
Gary Murphy is professor of politics at Dublin City University. Speaking My Mind is published by Sandycove at £25. To order your copy for T£19.99, call 0330 173 5030 or visit Telegraph Books
