Furious Higgins in a league of his own

THE political leader of the year is not Bertie Ahern. Sure, we learned a lot new about him this year but it wasn’t all good. He’s taken a few heavy dents in the past 12 months. For the first time going into an election, there will be no showroom shine.

So what do we know a bit better now? He’s not quite as nice as his carefully-cultivated image suggests. And his survival instincts are formidable. BertieGate showed him to be a much more crafty and calculating survivor than his mentor Charles Haughey (who was in many ways a lousy tactician).

On a recent trip to the Middle East, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair explained the “Mr Tony” nickname that his critics throw at him. When he first entered politics, he said, he wanted to please everybody. As he became older and less eager to please, he realised that some of his decisions would anger people, alienate people, turn people against him.

And, in turn, he started saying to himself: so what? Last week a clip of Ahern’s election as leader in 1994 was shown on TV. He was elected without a vote after Maire Geoghegan Quinn read the writing on the wall. At the time Ahern said he was very pleased because he was a consensus politician by nature. He still says that. He still gives that myth a public expression, that he’s eager to please. But make no mistake.

Ahern rules Fianna Fáil with a steely grip. And he is far more remote than that cosy “one of the lads” image suggests.

None of the senior figures within FF are privy to his decision-making, with the occasional exception of Brian Cowen. He showed Michael McDowell a glint of that metal when the new PD leader dared cast doubt over the coalition. Fine. You can ditch us, he said. But we’ll go it alone.

Yes, the polls show FF and its leader coming well out of BertieGate. But he has shipped some damage and that will hurt electorally. The “dog ate my homework” excuses he came up with will be viewed by a lot of people for what they were: phoney baloney.

The politician of the year is not Enda Kenny. After finally nearly proving himself as a credible leader, his was a year of inertia. Yes, he’s taken Fine Gael back from the brink but where is he leading them? To another brink? Kenny lost momentum during the year. He’s been three years now telling too much about how he’ll bring politics back to the people but telling us too little about how he’s going to do that.

Okay, he’ll sack ministers who don’t perform or who are found out to be dodgy. And he’s come up with the highly original gambit of being even tougher on crime than that other crowd. But there’s a sense that the public can’t envisage him as Taoiseach. It’s very true that the only way you can prove you can be Taoiseach is if you become Taoiseach — in other words, you grow into the job. But to do that you have to pass a certain threshold of authority, and he hasn’t passed it.

The political leader of the year is not Pat Rabbitte. Labour have struggled to make any gains in the opinion polls. The accord with Fine Gael has presented an alternative but at the expense of Labour’s independence. Rabbitte has devoted too much time to point scoring (sometimes petty) and negative carping, not enough to telling the population what he intends to do about it.

The political leader of the year is not Michael McDowell. Too many exaggerated promises, too much hyberbole, too little delivery, too many setbacks. And BertieGate showed us that he may pride himself on being an intuitive politician but that counts for nothing when faced with the counterintuitive chicanery of the FFers.

Neither Trevor Sargent nor Caomhghin ÓO Caolain is political leader of the year. Neither did enough, neither asserted or stimulated enough. You’d never believe it was the year before an election. With the exception of BertieGate in the autumn and the statutory rape crisis in the summer — we were stuck in the doldrums. No winds of change. Few storms of anger. Too few sightings of promised lands on the horizon.

The only one who maintained the furies all year was the TD who led a party of one. And for the consistency of his convictions (irrespective of your views on them) and for the way he can get to Bertie Ahern like no other, Joe Higgins is the political leader of the year.