Labour could do worse than look to The West Wing for electoral advice

THOSE of us who were fans of the hit US political drama The West Wing are suffering withdrawal symptoms.

The producers have decided to end the programme, and the last episode was screened by RTÉ a week ago. One of the strengths of the programme, especially for us political anoraks, was the extent to which its scriptwriters displayed a detailed knowledge of the internal workings of politics.

The penultimate programme of the last series is a case in point. It takes place a few weeks after a US presidential election and, in his transition office, president elect Mathew Santos is putting together his team for when he takes over at the White House.

The episode is titled Institutional Memory, and in one of its most important scenes, Santos has a meeting with one CJ Cregg, who is chief of staff to the outgoing president, Jeb Bartlett. Santos asks Cregg to continue working as a senior adviser to his new administration.

She initially thinks he is just being polite in offering her the job. However, he has a particular reason why he wants her to stay on.

“Institutional memory is an invaluable commodity,” Santos says. “We don’t just want you … we need you.”

One wonders whether there has been a similar conversation between Irish Labour leader Pat Rabbitte and the party’s outgoing national organiser Pat Magnier in recent months and if not, why not. Magnier retired from his full-time position at Labour headquarters last month, after 25 years in the job.

It will be a mystery to many why, just a year before an important election, the Labour party has let Magnier and his considerable institutional memories retire.

To mark his retirement, Magnier gave what proved to be a very significant interview to Sean O’Rourke on the Week in Politics last Sunday week. The gravity of what Magnier had to say got somewhat lost in last week’s avalanche of coverage about Charles Haughey's death. The Week in Politics has a good nose for what is politically and electorally significant and, realising what it had got with Magnier, it took the rather unusual step of giving their entire programme over to the interview.

Magnier has had a ringside seat at all of the main Labour party dramas of the past three decades, and has played a considerable part in many of them.

He talked about the excitement of working with Frank Cluskey as leader. He also had an interesting insight intothe tensions with Fine Gael and within the Labour party itself during the 1982-87 government.

Magnier was a central figure in Labour’s engine room when Dick Spring took on those with militant tendencies within the party’s ranks, and played no small part in honing the electoral machine that delivered the Springtide election result in 1992.

He also played a role maintaining harmonious relations in the Albert Reynolds / Dick Spring government until the level of communications difficulties between the two parties, and particularly the two leaders, became so bad that even somebody of his patience couldn’t stop the inevitable collapse.

Although Magnier has retired from his full-time position, he will play a role in the election committee — so, to an extent, the Labour party will have access to his private counsel. Mind you, in his TV interview Magnier went public on advice he appears to have been giving privately for the past couple of years. The effect of his interview, and maybe its purpose, was to caution the party against painting itself into a corner on the question of government formation after the next election.

He was an internal party opponent of the Rabbitte strategy of signing up exclusively to a pre-election pack with Fine Gael. However he, like others, has accepted defeat on this aspect graciously and acknowledges that Rabbitte has been consistent on this point.

Rabbitte said before the 2002 election he would not serve in any government with Fianna Fáil. Then when Ruairi Quinn stepped down after the election, Rabbitte campaigned in the subsequent leadership election on a platform of ruling out the option of going into government with Fianna Fáil. He then got an overwhelming endorsement for his strategy of a pre-election pack with Fine Gael.

As Sean O’Rourke put it to Magnier, Rabbitte’s strategy will ultimately be judged a success or failure depending on whether, this time next year, he is Tánaiste to Enda Kenny’s Taoiseach.

IN the television interview, however, Magnier did the Labour party some service by talking about what would happen if, after the election, Fine Gael and Labour do not have the numbers to form a government (even with the Greens and a couple of left-leaning independents). In so doing, he has dealt with a question which both Rabbitte and Enda Kenny have ducked and deflected from each time they have been asked it in recent months.

The scenario which Magnier is talking about is not a fanciful concept — in fact, it is a scenario which is more likely than not. It is worth remembering that after two of the past four elections, the Dáil did not elect a Taoiseach on the first day it met after the election. We tend to forget because Bertie Ahern was elected on the first vote after the 2002 and 1997 elections — things were very different in 1992 and 1989.

When the new Dáil held its first meeting after the 1992 election, it could not elect a Taoiseach. Albert Reynolds stayed in the job in a caretaking capacity while Dick Spring explored his various coalition options. In the weeks that followed, Reynolds had a very successful European summit at which he negotiated £8 billion of structural funds for Ireland. There was a long recount in Dublin South Central which finished in Fianna Fáil favour. Then, having failed to do business with John Bruton and Fine Gael, Spring put a government together with Fianna Fáil. A Reynolds-Spring coalition was one very few people had envisaged before the election.

The weeks after polling day in the 1989 election were even more dramatic.

Again, when the new Dáil first met on July 12 that year, nobody could get enough votes to be elected Taoiseach. Then, after a few stormy political weeks, what had hitherto been regarded as politically impossible happened. Fianna Fáil dropped its single party government-only hang up and negotiated a coalition with the Progressive Democrats. Nobody dared to think of a Haughey-O’Malley government before the 1989 election.

At, or about, this time next year, a new Dáil will meet after the election. If neither the current government parties nor the rainbow alternative have a clear majority, then things could happen like this: Labour TDs would get to maintain their pre-election promises and comply with Rabbitte’s pre-election strategy by voting for Enda Kenny as Taoiseach. Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, with the Fianna Fáil gene pool independents, can vote for Bertie Ahern. However, neither man would have enough votes to be elected Taoiseach.

Then the Dáil will adjourn, there will be a further stand-off and a lot of posturing in the media. It might take days, maybe even weeks, but private back-channel explorations will be opened between any combination of parties which could combine to make up the required 83-plus seats, with or without some independents.

In that scenario, all bets are off, and Labour would be wise to take Magnier’s advice and position itself to play a part in the government-forming stakes.