Acting tough isn’t enough

“SOMEDAY a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

That reign will be Enda Kenny’s.

He may not have quoted Taxi Driver’s crime-avenging anti-hero Travis Bickle exactly, but that was the clear subtext of the Fine Gael leader’s Árd Fheis speech where he was repackaged as Alpha Male Enda the Defender.

Expect to see more of angry Enda, mountaineering Enda and perhaps even Enda’s apparently awesome impression of the Boss, Bruce Springsteen, (I’m not making this up) in the months ahead.

Say what you like about Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s politics — if indeed you believe that he has any particular political ideology worth speaking of — but the public image he projects seems to dovetail well with the private one.

The Bass-drinking, GAA-loving regular guy thing doesn’t come across as an act.

Unlike, say, Tony Blair, who strains to appear one of the lads, but instead stands out like a chilled bottle of Chablis in a room full of strewn lager cans.

The 20 or so times I’ve met the British prime minister there has always been a subtle fault-line evident in his character.

During interviews he is incredibly composed and unbreakdownable.

However, in the relatively more relaxed atmosphere of Downing Street or Labour Party functions, you got the feeling he really wanted to shed the straight jacket of office, drop the act, and be himself.

Indeed, the only time he has ever come close to losing his public composure was when pressed by BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman about whether he and born-again Christian George Bush had ever prayed together.

And there emerges another political enigma.

The startling fact about George W Bush is that he really is not as stupid as we so like to think he is.

In private the president of the US is apparently extremely sharp and on the ball.

How different to the public performance where he speaks as if English is a foreign language to him and he intones the words coming out of his mouth as if it is the first time he had ever heard them inside his own head.

Perhaps, Americans feel more comfortable if their leaders appear not to be too clever.

But then in their defence, half a million more Americans voted for Al Gore in 2000 than Bush Jnr.

It is also worth remembering how easily we have all forgotten the most powerful man in the world is a recovering alcoholic who kept deliberately quiet about a drink driving conviction and dodged questions over whether or not he had a raging cocaine habit in the 1980s in the most slippery of fashions while running for the White House.

Of course, blurring the line between perception and reality is one of the finer political arts anyone who aspires to lead must first master.

Bertie may well be a genuine nice guy, but he also possesses the ruthless streak needed by someone capable of remaining at the very top of the political game for as long as he has.

And we are now being urged to be believe that tough-talking Enda is finally packing the same mettle.

His finger-jabbing image — thankfully without Travis Bickle’s mohican — lunges out from billboards across the land promising (threatening?): “I’ll make the criminals pay for their crimes.”

Whether you find this comical or compelling, at least its an improvement on Fine Gael’s woeful 2002 election slogan “Vision with Purpose” — presumably the equally pointless tag-line “Banality Without Meaning” had already been copyrighted.

The maxim that all political careers end in failure is a cliché because it is so true.

For all Blair’s tough-guy posturing this week, he is just waiting for a break in the storm.

He will go suddenly in the autumn, the moment it looks as if it is of his own volition and he is not being hounded from office.

That will be the final political act of illusion of his now terminally contaminated premiership.

Whether the politics of illusion will work for Mr Kenny is another matter entirely.