Jilted Joan and Indecisive Enda do the time warp

The horsetrading over an election date has been an unseemly PR disaster that’s left Joan Burton humiliated and Enda Kenny painted as somebody unable to keep his partners on side, writes Shaun Connolly

A JILTED Joan and an Indecisive Enda, not really the best way to start the election season as a united front.

Beggars can’t be choosers, and Mr Kenny has certainly humiliated his Tánaiste in public by leaving her to effectively beg him not to choose November for a snap poll.

The whole unseemly, and easily avoidable, PR disaster once again highlighted Labour’s desperate dread of the inevitable day when they finally have to meet angry voter after angry voter in the polling booth which now represents for them the dark back alley where they await a sound kicking from the electorate.

It also paints Mr Kenny in a very unflattering light as someone unable to make up his own mind and lacking the strategic intelligence to keep his partners on side as he does so.

On Tuesday, Joan insisted that she had a long election conversation with Enda (but then, as all her utterances often feel longer than the Bible, this may not mean much) and she told us the chat ended in “next year”.

But perhaps, she misunderstood, and Mr Kenny just wondered aloud if it was next year already as she had been waffling on for so long?

Just 48 hours later Labour was in full public panic mode and when pressed on whether the Tánaiste thought she had obtained a guarantee from the Taoiseach on timing, she went all evangelically-vague and babbled: “Next year in Jerusalem!” before a handler actually grabbed her away from the microphone.

But, the problem for Labour is that they know if the election is early, it won’t so much be next year in Jerusalem, but rather next year in oblivion, as the party would be lucky to come back with little more than half a dozen seats at the moment.

In their desperation to head off an early poll, Labour is now reduced to stabbing Enda in the back with the daggers of faint praise as they insist he is such an “honourable” and “honest” man he would never go back on his word to them that the Coalition would go full-term.

Yeah, right.

Just weeks ago, Mr Kenny was insisting: “I’ve always said the general election would be in the spring of 2016, and I see no reason to change that,” so there will be a severe credibility gap if he does a political somersault on that one.

Mr Kenny will also be open to charges that Labour clearly think he is no longer “honest” or “honourable” which is going to make their voter transfer pact look even more thread-bare than it is already.

But Enda seems to enjoy his new role as the teasing Taoiseach as he refuses to rule out November with increasingly theatrical flourishes. Why he even claimed the Constitution allows him to remain in office for another two years — but then Mr Kenny never did have much of a grasp on the law.

Mr Kenny misquoted the Garda Siochana Act for two full days when he was first embroiled in the controversy surrounding the ousting of commissioner Martin Callinan, and then deliberately pretended to misunderstand the rules regarding evidence to the commission of inquiry into the affair, insisting he could not even say if he had spoken to investigating judge Fennelly, when in the Real World, the law only states he could not say what he actually told the prober.

So Mr Kenny can be quite slippery when he wants to be, which makes Joan’s surprise at his twisting on timing all the more, well, surprising.

Given that Enda has been banging on about spring for so long he is going to need a good excuse to cut and run in November, but being such a master of political cynicism, the dodgy offering will probably be that the media speculation (which, of course, he has deliberately stoked-up) is now causing uncertainty and undermining the economy, so he has no choice but to go now.

By letting the speculation spill over into such a storm Mr Kenny is on a hiding to nothing. If he goes for November, he will have thrown away the aura of quiet, calm stability he has tried to establish until this week with his constant talk of 2016, and will have royally pissed off the Labour Party in the process.

With Fine Gael almost certain to be the largest party, but likely to lose 20+ plus seats and end-up in the early 50s, he will also be sniped at by some in his party for not holding out until the spring when things could have been better.

And if he does step back from the brink after allowing such a burst of electoral fever to explode around him and wait for the spring, Mr Kenny will be branded a political coward, and when the party gets roughly the same number of TDs in February as it is likely to take next month, critics will rue that the party would have achieved far more if he had not lost his nerve in November.

Gordon Brown also let such speculation mount in the months after he succeeded Tony Blair as British PM in 2007, but when vanity got the better of him after polls showed he would win well, but not get as big a majority as Blair achieved, and he dithered and decided against a snap general election his popularity never recovered.

Suddenly, he was branded a “Bottler Brown” by a secretly relieved opposition and a reputation for indecisiveness was forged in the electorate’s mind which lasted all the way down to him being unceremoniously turfed out of office after he had no option but to go full-term.

The Fine Gael push for November is predicated on the fact they fear losing control of events by February. So, if they can’t even trust themselves to competently run the country for another three months, why on earth should voters trust them to do so for another five years?