A political movement

MOST people might have imagined that Mary O’Rourke was our most revealing politician when she told the nation that she was having a bath when, as Transport Minister, she heard on the radio that the chairman of CIÉ had resigned.

It has taken another senior politician 16 years to go one better.

Who else but the cherubic Leo Varadkar, responding to the Irish Examiner’s reasonable interpretation of his go-it-alone welfare policy as an indication of his political ambitions?

Asked whether his announcement of his intention to index link welfare payments was aimed at persuading people to vote for him, Mr Varadkar replied: “No matter what I say or do for the last six months people are linking it to the leadership of Fine Gael.

“I’m just waiting for the moment that I sit on the toilet and some commentator somewhere decides that’s part of some sort of strategy.”

Is this, one wonders, not a pitch for Fine Gael leadership but part of a new political movement?