Fintan O’Toole: The problem isn’t the SCU. It’s Leo Varadkar

John Concannon, head of the Government's now notorious Strategic Communications Unit (SCU), is not Josef Goebbels. The SCU is not, as one might think from some of the more hysterical Dáil exchanges in recent days, the ministry of truth from George Orwell's 1984.

Its launch of the Government's Project 2040 capital plan did not use taxpayer's money to promote Fine Gael election candidates in the paid-for advertorials that ran in virtually every regional and national newspaper: as Harry McGee reported in The Irish Times "only one newspaper, the Longford Leader, featured a Fine Gael candidate, and the paper took that decision entirely by itself".

And Fianna Fáil’s attempts to turn the SCU into the greatest national scandal are laughable: the party, when in power, pioneered the use of taxpayer-funded publicity to identify all national projects with the great national movement that is Fianna Fáil and its glorious leaders.

The problem, then, is not Concannon – it is his boss Leo Varadkar.

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The Taoiseach strongly hinted this week that Concannon and the SCU may be for the chop because they have committed the original sin in the world of spin – they have become the story.

Or, as Varadkar put it on Morning Ireland on Monday, "a distraction from the work of Government". (That may be code for thinking that SCU stands for Stop Cocking Up.)

Since the arrival of mass media, marketing has been inextricable from political life

They may even deserve that fate for their part in gauche attempts to lean on newspapers to ensure that the Project 2040 “special reports” were not clearly distinguished from independent journalism.

Just possibly their missteps may force the general secretary of the Department of the Taoiseach Martin Fraser, who has been asked to conduct a review of the SCU, which he already oversees, to issue a stern and necessary reminder that public money must not be used for political propaganda.

But will any of that change the way the Taoiseach thinks about politics, what his critics see as a relentless prioritisation of communication over content, of style over substance?

Mass media

Of course, those charges are routinely laid against most contemporary democratic politicians. Since the arrival of mass media, marketing has been inextricable from political life: the political geniuses do their own marketing, the rest hire people to do it for them.

Indeed, if you’re a prime minister and you’re not being charged with being obsessed with spin, it almost certainly means you’re in terrible trouble. (Theresa May acting in this regard as the control in the great political messaging experiment.)

Or it means that, like for example Jeremy Corbyn, allegedly not being concerned with your image is the core of your image. This is a game political leaders, in an age of public cynicism, cannot win – if they’re good at it, they are slick and superficial and if they’re bad at it, they are merely clueless. And slick and superficial beats clueless every time.

At one level, then, Leo Varadkar’s concern with public image is unremarkable. It is well to remember, indeed, that it was the most intellectual and erudite of his predecessors, Garret FitzGerald – a man who seemed natural and unguarded to the point of naivety – who really introduced marketing to the top levels of Irish politics.

For today's concerns about the SCU, it would be easy to swap, in the 1970s, the Irish Times columnist John Healy's constant sniping at Garret FitzGerald's "national handlers" – men like the late Bill O'Herlihy and Frank Flannery.

One of the key handlers, Peter Prendergast, was the man who had persuaded Irish people to eat an unfamiliar product, yogurt, by promoting the Yoplait brand. Another, Shane Molloy, was marketing director for Lever Brothers in Ireland. The business of selling a political leader as you would any other product goes back 40 years in Fine Gael.

He comes from a generation that places an enormous premium on being connected

But this continuity should not blind us to two important differences. One is that Varadkar is a product of Generation Communication. He is a native of the new, wired-up, always-on social-media world.

In November 2008, before the ascent of smartphones, he told The Irish Times of his addiction to his Blackberry: "I use it as a phone also, so rarely turn it off. I was in Mongolia for three weeks volunteering during the summer and it didn't work there. I panicked for about two days . . ."

Divide

This is the great generational divide. There are people who are surprised and disconcerted when they can’t keep in touch with all their mates in Mongolia and there are people who, if they were ever lucky enough to get to Mongolia, would maybe just about wonder if there’s a post office in Ulaanbaatar from which they might send a postcard to their mother.

There is no mystery about which side of the divide Varadkar inhabits. He comes from a generation that places an enormous premium on being connected and being in touch, that is locked in the feedback loop of approval, that craves the endorphin rush of constant endorsement.

He wants, therefore, to be our friend. He shows us on Twitter the last crepe he is just about to eat before he goes on his diet for Lent. He likes us to see him in his running gear. He puts up images of himself being photobombed by a llama. He sends us pictures from his holidays.

His Twitter profile has him as "Taoiseach, fitness fan. Has been known to talk too much. Likes to travel." The comma in the first bit is a telling use of punctuation – one imagines David Brent would put "Boss, entertainer" so the second term would profoundly qualify the first.

And this is new. Previously, national politicians wanted to be admired, even adulated. They wanted us to see them as strong and capable and indispensable. But they didn’t want to be our mates.

New, of course, is not necessarily wrong – the man we seem to have fallen almost unconsciously into calling just “Leo” is highly popular. Maybe we do want the Taoiseach to be our friend.

Substance

But this does rub up against the second big difference. Garret FitzGerald was certainly sold like yogurt. Yet there was something of known substance to sell. He wrote books and essays and argued passionately for things that were sometimes difficult and divisive. And the selling was clearly distinguishable from the product: FitzGerald was himself, and the handlers had to handle what they got. With Varadkar it is not so easy to distinguish the person from the persona. And it is even harder to see the substance behind the style.

This is not because Varadkar is not smart or because he doesn’t believe in certain political ideas. It is because the things he does believe in, his deepest ideological instincts, are out of kilter with his political needs.

The political centre in Ireland is much more consensual and ambiguous

He is a standard, post-Thatcher conservative in a State that cannot be governed by post-Thatcher conservatism. His reflexes are quite reactionary (the appeals to the “people who get up early in the morning”, the vast exaggeration of welfare fraud while ignoring white-collar crime).

But the political centre in Ireland is much more consensual and ambiguous. So Varadkar seems to be constantly having to pull away from his own beliefs. And this creates a vacuum that is filled by nice-guy images and highly controlled messaging.

Unless this contradiction is resolved, he will always be drawn more to strategic communications than to communicating a strategy.