Will the real Enda Kenny please stand up?
Eight years and two failed general elections later, as he emerged from a meeting with his party, Enda Kenny realised a good sales pitch is what he’s been missing all along.
“Maybe I should loosen up a bit,” he confessed on national radio after a meeting with his frontbench on Tuesday to discuss his leadership in light of George Lee’s resignation.
“Sometimes people say to me ‘when I meet you one-to-one, I don’t get the same impression as I do on television’.
“What I’m going to do now is be myself. And I’m going to speak out from my heart,” he said.
The Fine Gael leader’s problem was best summed up by foreign affairs spokesperson Billy Timmins who said after Tuesday’s meeting: “Substance triumphs over style and Enda Kenny has substance in abundance.”
But all the substance in the world was not enough to satisfy some party members who believe Kenny’s public image is holding back the party and called for a re-brand of their leader.
He has to “step up to the mark” as frontbench spokesperson Simon Coveney put it, and pull off a massive political reinvention. “If he can’t achieve it, there’s the obvious consequences of that,” said Coveney.
The problem with Enda Kenny’s brand is the exact opposite to that of Taoiseach Brian Cowen. “He is too perfect,” said Billy Dixon, an image consultant and expert on personal projection and communication who advises many senior politicians in Britain and some here.
Brian Cowen is a man that enjoys a few pints and often looks like he hasn’t put too much thought into his personal appearance. Many voters around the country know somebody like that.
But most people don’t know any man groomed to strawberry blonde perfection, with a forced grin, like Enda Kenny.
“He is too perfect. People cannot relate to him, he is not one of them,” said Dixon.
“Many successful politicians, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton deliberately built flaws into their personal image. Reagan had a way of tilting his head to one side to show vulnerability. He would have also stumbled on his words and that helped people to warm to him and feel that he was somebody they could get on with,” he said.
“It’s vital for a politician to make contact with people’s emotional side. You need to build trust. A third of trust is built of facts and figures, what they promise to do. But two thirds of trust will be built on emotional contact,” said Dixon.
He believes Kenny has been over-advised through the years and is no longer able to be himself with voters.
“The political battlefield is full of people who haven’t been themselves and suffered politically as a result,” he said.
Enda Kenny “hit the nail on the head himself”, according to his old associate Maurice Manning, when he said people see a difference between his public and private persona.
“Socially he is gregarious. He is great in small group contact. He has an utterly genuine interest in every individual he meets, with him it is absolutely genuine,” said Manning who has travelled and socialised with Kenny during his time as a Fine Gael senator.
Another former colleague, Ivan Yates, recalled in Fine Gael A Party at the Crossroads by Kevin Rafter that: “When I knew him first we were both single, footloose and fancy-free TDs. We would go out to nightclubs together and he would be happy to stay in bed half the day.”
Voters who see Enda as too wooden might be surprised to hear how he met his wife Fionnuala. The young TD was making a speech in the Dáil and had to stop when he looked up at the press gallery and saw the woman who then worked for Charlie Haughey.
In his own words he “saw a vision with flowing chestnut hair in a blue dress and I stopped and thought ‘Jesus’!” He says he winked at her from the Dáil floor.
“He is actually quite passionate in private, he has great conviction,” said Manning.
Dixon said: “In social settings, Enda is very animated and has great facial expressions. In public his hands are always still, he does not use any facial expressions and he shows no passion.
“He always looks like he is restrained in some way.”
Manning said his problem is an old style of political rhetoric that is “more suited to public meetings than television”.
He said: “He uses a West of Ireland political speak that uses more adjectives than are necessary. Sometimes he would benefit from being much more direct and to the point.”
By choosing to proclaim publicly this week that he is going to let his human side show, Kenny has invited voters to take another look at him.
According to Dixon, saying this publicly was a risk: “It could also go against him. People will benchmark him against that and his opponents will use it against him in the future.”
But he believes Kenny can renew himself: “Politicians have done it very successfully throughout the years.”
For Kenny that challenge is greater because he does not need to reinvent his politics and what he stands for but his entire political brand.
On Wednesday night, some Fianna Fáil TDs mischievously reported in the Dáil bar that shouting could be heard in the corridors from the Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting.
The TDs who, behind closed doors, brought Enda Kenny to the realisation that salesmanship is as important as leadership, might do well to read the words of Price Floyd.
A director of media relations for George W Bush, Floyd said: “Other public affairs officials [would] say, ‘We need to get our people out there on more media.’
I’d say: ‘It’s not so much the packaging, it’s the substance that’s giving us trouble’.”
