I am having an ideological discussion with former taoiseach Leo Varadkar in his large and pristine kitchen in Dublin 8. It’s a scenario many on social media fantasise about (in these fantasies winning the argument) because he’s seen as something of an ideologue (he would dispute this). He is wearing an open-necked, light blue shirt. He looks relaxed and well rested. We are drinking instant coffee. There’s a blackboard on the wall signed by visitors to the house. There are Lego sets of Dublin landmarks including the Poolbeg Towers and Pantibar on the stainless-steel extractor fan of his oven.
Varadkar announced his resignation as taoiseach unexpectedly in March 2024. Since then he has written his memoir, Speaking My Mind; he started a guest lecturing post at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for public leadership and he consults for the Penta group, meeting business and political leaders. He also does pro-bono work for LGBTQ+ groups in eastern Europe and recently visited Bulgaria and Hungary (this year Hungary banned LGBTQ+ gatherings). And he has an “occasional” column with the Sunday Times, which he recognises as ironic given that he once dissed former political leaders such as Garret FitzGerald for writing “boring” articles in retirement.
Now 46, he’s enjoying the absence of “low-level anxiety” retirement has brought even if becoming taoiseach was the pinnacle of an obsession he’d had with politics from the age of seven. “I would always watch the news with my folks after dinner. I was excited and transfixed by this idea that elections could turn those ordinary people on posters into people who were influential.” He loved the mechanics of the voting. He loved Eurovision for the same reason. “The signs of being gay were there,” he says.
His specific political beliefs came from growing up the son of a GP running his own practice. “Work hard, study hard, self-reliance, don’t expect things for free, the State is there to help you, but not there to provide for you necessarily.” He was also always internationalist in outlook, “partially due to the fact I grew up in a household with an Indian father. The world wasn’t just Blanchardstown or Castleknock.”
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He got involved with Young Fine Gael while studying medicine in Trinity College Dublin. His parents considered this an “eccentric hobby”, he says, and worried about his education. With good reason at first – he failed his exams in 1999 because he was running for the council elections. After college he worked as a non-consultant hospital doctor in St James’s and Connolly hospitals but he was co-opted to Fingal County Council in 2003 and was elected to the Dáil in 2007.
He says he always knew his political weaknesses. The kind of easy-going, flesh-pressing charisma exhibited by the likes of Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin eluded him. He preferred debates, writing policy documents, argument. “I had to learn to be better at the other stuff.”
He got noticed initially as “Fine Gael’s Rottweiler”, tackling his opponents in ways others resisted. Many of his colleagues “had personal relationships with the Fianna Fáilers and me being a new TD, I was more willing to go for the jugular”.
He didn’t care about being liked, which was and is unusual for an Irish politician. “Probably as time went on, I wanted to be liked more,” he says now.
Is that because, when he was repressing part of his identity the dislike didn’t seem personal, but now it does?
He thinks for a moment. “Maybe, yeah. I hadn’t thought about that, but maybe.”
There are points in his career where he fell out with friends over politics. Lucinda Creighton and he fell out when she left Fine Gael to form Renua (though he says they’re friendly again) and earlier still he upset his constituency colleague and mentor Sheila Terry when he got the party nomination over her ahead of the 2007 election. “I feel bad about the way I handled that because a more mature me now would have sat down and been up front and said, ‘Look, I’m going to go for it’.”
Was his ambition running ahead of his interpersonal skills at that point? “I think so. One thing I would have learned from that is it’s probably better to be a bit more upfront about your ambitions.” He reflects. “One thing that’s difficult about politics is you don’t really know who your friends are. There’s a whole lot of people in Leinster House hanging around every day, having lunch and dinner together, pretending to be friends, but they’re not really.”
This breeds paranoia. He outlines some paranoid moments in the book. When giving out Covid vaccines alongside former Dáil colleague and fellow GP James Reilly, Reilly offered him a spare vaccine. He refused on the basis that it might be skipping the queue and he wondered if it was Reilly’s attempt at catching him out after they’d fallen out years earlier. Does he really think Reilly was trying to trip him up? “I don’t, really.”
There’s another incident during the Covid era where, while Ireland hadn’t yet opened up to allow festivals, he was photographed at a British festival, causing a minor scandal. Because the person who took the photograph was tangentially connected to Simon Harris some colleagues suggested that scandal was orchestrated. Does he believe that? “No. It was too far a stretch.”
His politics have changed over the years, particularly around issues such as equal marriage and abortion. In the book he links his early social conservatism to repressing his true identity. “I definitely think that closeted gay men – and I’ve known a lot of them down the years – can be more judgmental and are sometimes more conservative. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that if you’re imposing such difficult self-discipline on yourself, you don’t understand why other people can’t do the same thing ... But it wasn’t just that. Society changed too. I’m not the first person to change my mind on marriage equality. Barack Obama was against it as well.”
Jacinda Ardern crystalised it for me... She said there were three ways to go: die, lose or resign
For most of his life he was out to very few people. “For a long time, I thought that it would go away or I would meet the right girl. It increasingly became evident that that wasn’t going to happen.”
In 2015, he came out to the nation on Miriam O’Callaghan’s radio show, with the marriage referendum as “the catalyst and the trigger”. He talked in that interview about how he had always assumed he would end up alone. He believed that. “The weirdest part was I said this thing about how being gay wasn’t going to define my identity … That was totally wrong. I remember Rory O’Neill, Panti, doing an interview about me in the days after that, and he said, ‘He thinks that now but that can’t be the case’ and he was totally right … It opened up a whole new world.”
How so? “I got a whole new friend group, different types of social life, a partner. All those things that were there before were gone: thinking I’d never have a partner [he met Barrett the August after the referendum]. My social life and social group, almost all people interested in politics or involved in Fine Gael.” He thinks for a moment. “It was like emigrating.”
Two-and-a-half years later he became leader of Fine Gael and taoiseach. Was there pressure on Enda Kenny, whom he succeeded, to quit? “There was. The 2016 election results were a shock ... Five years after the crash, Fianna Fáil came within 1 per cent of beating us. That was not expected.”
In his memoir didn’t he liken Fianna Fáil to the undead? “I think I actually described them as ‘vampires’. Vampires can be wonderful creatures as well, like in the Twilight series. They’re immortal but also strangely attractive to the public for some reason.”
Did Varadkar personally put pressure on Kenny? “No, but a lot of people around me did ... I was always wary and worried about that, because aside from the disloyalty element of it … there was also the risk that it could backfire because, as they say in politics, the person who wields the sword rarely wears the crown.”
There’s a recurring theme in the book about managing appearances. It could sound “calculating”. Maybe he prefers, “strategic”? He laughs. “‘Strategic’ is good and ‘calculating’ is bad … I’d always be trying to map out the sequelae, you know.” It might be “part of the medical training. If this happens, what happens next? How does that person react? How do you react? It came in handy during Brexit”.
During the battle for the Fine Gael party leadership with Simon Coveney there was an article focusing on Coveney’s wife as a political asset, which in how it was framed, looked like negative comment on Varadkar’s sexuality. “I think that may just have been unconscious bias. I don’t think there was a cabal who were secretly plotting homophobic attacks.”
But was it hurtful? “It certainly felt like that.”
Varadkar’s critique of Coveney was that he was making Fine Gael all things for everyone. “My view was that that’s not how modern politics works. Let’s aim for 40 per cent and get 35 per cent.”
He said he represented the people who “get up early in the morning” and this was linked to a campaign he ran as minister for social protection against welfare cheats. To many it sounded like a classist dog-whistle and unfair to those on welfare for legitimate reasons. He meant to include, he says, “people who get up to care, carers, and night workers and shift workers … It was a metaphor for people who believe it isn’t all about rights and that people have a responsibility to contribute.”
[ Campaign for Leo: The inside story of how Varadkar beat Simon CoveneyOpens in new window ]
What does he mean by that? “There’s a minority that subscribe to an entitlement culture … that they have a right to a huge number of things and somebody else should pay for it.”
But surely that’s a negligible minority? “It would be interesting to do a good study of that … I have a good record of improving social benefits. But to have free or subsidised education, healthcare, childcare, all these things that are social goods, you need a huge number of people paying into the system. [For the left] it’s all about ‘here’s the cake. How do we divide it up more fairly?’ What centre-right or right politicians realise is that the cake has to be created.”
I put it to him that the left-wing argument would be that wealth is more collectively created than the right acknowledges, because of publicly funded infrastructure and labour. “[Wealth is] created by work, by innovation, by inventing things. I’d love to see how this collective wealth is created.”
I suggest his party’s housing failure might be linked to his focus on that specific 40 per cent of the electorate more likely to have houses or rental properties, which makes it difficult to introduce radical housing reforms. He disagrees. “In our defence, when we started off in government, there were about 7,000 houses being built a year. By the end, it was over 30,000 so we quadrupled housing. Eight hundred first-time buyers a week now are getting mortgage approval and social housing is being built at a scale we haven’t seen since the 1970s. Was it enough to solve the problem? Absolutely not.”
Initially he really enjoyed being taoiseach, he says, but that changed. “I think you’re given a certain amount of political capital and I felt that was depleted, and it was just getting so much harder to get things done. People do become more cynical about you over time.”
He disliked when he and colleagues were dismissed as private school “posh boys”. Isn’t there a genuine critique, beyond the name-calling, of how private education can narrow someone’s outlook? “But would that not also be true if somebody goes to a Deis school?” he asks.
Someone who goes to a Deis school is less likely to be taoiseach. “I understand where that comes from, but everyone has limited perspective based on who they are and their upbringing. Women see things differently to men, gay people to straight, somebody who grew up as mixed race in a very white country … I think people are very quick to see other people’s bubble and not realise their own. You know when it stopped? When Mary Lou, Ivana and Holly Cairns became leaders because they’re at least as posh as me.”
Varadkar became the focal point for more extreme racist and homophobic abuse when right-wing populism began to rise. “There were moments when I would doomscroll [social media] and think, ‘Oh my God’ ... I pretty much stopped using X long before I stepped down.”
In the book he suggests that if the Garda inquiry into the leaking of a confidential GP contract document to Dr Maitiú Ó Tuathail from the National Association of General Practitioners hadn’t concluded, he might still be taoiseach. “If I had resigned in that period, everyone would say that was the reason,” he says.
Does he understand why people were upset? “I could count on one hand the times it came up from the doors. Obviously, it was the wrong thing to do. But the reason I think it didn’t become such a big deal politically and even in journalistic circles, is that back channels are not uncommon in negotiations.”
To people outside all that it looks like a circle of connected people helping each other out. “It wasn’t. The mistake that I made was not realising that when somebody is a friend or acquaintance, you almost have to be even more careful with that … I certainly had nothing personal to gain from it. It came from the experience of trying to extend the free GP care to the under-sixes.”
Does he think he did anything wrong? “I do accept it was wrong … It was a breach of procedures, but it isn’t something that is all that unusual in negotiations.”
He still wonders if the long Garda investigation was retribution for the way he dealt with the Maurice McCabe scandal, which led to the resignation of two Garda commissioners. “I have a lot of respect for [An Garda Síochána]. I just never fully understood a) why the investigation happened in the first place, and b) why it took so long … People asked me ‘Are you being distracted by this?’ and my answer was ‘no, it might be distracting other people but it’s not distracting me’ but, of course, it was distracting. It was definitely a tough time.”
He has benefited greatly from the support his partner Barrett adds to his life, he says. “It’s great to have somebody to share your life with, somebody who’s unconditionally on your side, but will tell you when you’re absolutely wrong.” At another point, he says, “We’re not a political couple. Maybe that was a good thing for me, because if I’d partnered up with somebody who was really into politics and my career, maybe I’d still be doing it.”
Why did he resign? “Jacinda Ardern crystallised it for me,” he says, speaking about the former prime minister of New Zealand. “She said there were three ways to go: die, lose or resign and if you’re going to resign, make sure it’s on your terms ... Also, I’ve seen politicians who lost their seats or lost elections and never really got over it. And I had seen politicians who were forced to resign, people like Frances Fitzgerald … Alan Shatter as well. I saw the extent to which an untimely resignation impacted on people.”
Was there internal pressure? “No. I think anyone who wanted to succeed me at that stage was looking towards after the next election.”
Did he feel like current party leader Tánaiste Simon Harris was snapping at his heels? “I always knew that he wanted to be party leader and taoiseach one day. He reminded me of me with Enda Kenny and that’s why, while some people around me didn’t like how ambitious he was, I always understood it. I could see a bit of myself in him.”
How does he feel Harris is doing? “The burden of incumbency is great. The longer you’re in office, the harder it gets. But he’s doing well. He’s the leader of the party of which I’m still an active member. So he’s got my support.”
He does not, for the record, seem jealous of Harris. He’s glad he resigned, he says. “It’s a really tough gig.”
Speaking My Mind by Leo Varadkar is published by Sandycove is out now. Varadkar will be in conversation with Gavan Reilly as part of the Borris festival in The Mansion House, Dublin, on Sunday September 14th.
