Leo seems to have the lionheart to succeed Enda

Has Leo made his lunge? Mr Varadkar, our thrusting, Thatcherite Transport Minister, appears to have fired the first shot in the War of the Blueshirt Succession.

The end game, or the Enda game, if you will, is underway.

How else to explain his thundering intervention into the whistleblower affair?

Seemingly betting on Mr Kenny being bundled off to Brussels in the near future, as the compromise president of the European Council, Mr Varadkar saw the chance to out-manoeuvre his main rival for the leadership, Simon Coveney, and did so with gusto.

While Mr Varadkar tried to make it all appear very off-the-cuff. There was a very deliberate calculation in his successful attempt to seize the moral high-ground from which to look down on Mr Coveney.

The Agriculture Minister had dipped a far more cautious toe into the controversy, with rather guarded comments about reforming the Garda Síochána, but Mr Varadkar went for the jugular, insisting that Commissioner Martin Callinan “isn’t above criticism”, before unleashing an unprecedented rebuke to the head of the force.

Calling on Mr Callinan to withdraw remarks branding the whistleblowers as “disgusting”, the Minister showered truth-seekers, Sgt Maurice McCabe and John Wilson, with praise for shining “a light into a dark place” on behalf of “those who would rather turn a blind-eye [than] face up to the truth”.

A week out of the country, spent pressing the St Patrick’s festival flesh in Savannah, Georgia, seems to have given Mr Varadkar time to think about his next move up the political ladder, or, as Benjamin Disraeli famously called it, ‘the greasy pole’.

While Simon is slickly cautious, Leo has a reputation for letting rip on occasion, and has clearly decided that will be one of his major selling points in the tussle to be Taoiseach that lies ahead.

While Simon showed skill in his deft handling of the horse-meat crisis, especially in softly batting away all those awkward questions about exactly why his experts kept him, and by extension us, in the dark for so long, Leo has also been something of a lucky general, presiding over a portfolio with a lot of publicity but little impact.

The transport budget was one of the great Government victims of the crash, so any project he manages to ‘save’ is hailed as a minor miracle, while tourism is on the up, with The Gathering, which never got out of second gear, producing the goods.

And jetting off, out of the country, just before strikes threatened to shut down the airports, was a gamble that only paid off because the courts took his side against the unions at the last minute.

Why, he even got away with being a minister for sport who doesn’t actually like sport, because of his sheer bluffness over the issue.

And that quality — the ability to appear to call things as they are, even if the message is much more contrived than he likes to let on — is the very thing that sets him apart from most of his fellow ministers, who are as wooden as the Cabinet table they sit around.

Though, of course, no one could accuse Justice Minister Alan Shatter of ever having a dull moment, but his continual scramble to stop tripping himself-up over a string of political squalls, ranging from penalty points to GSOC bugging, has left his credibility decidedly dented.

Perhaps that’s one reason Mr Varadkar feels he can go up against him in such a pointed fashion, as he effectively rubbished the Justice Minister’s version of events when it came to the whistleblowers.

While Mr Shatter sides with the Commissioner by insisting Sgt McCabe is too dangerous to be allowed on the PULSE computer system unsupervised, because he “distributed confidential information to the general public”, Mr Varadkar, rightly, paints the man as a modern-day hero, who went through all the proper procedures before responsibly relaying his concerns to TDs.

And how should we take Leo’s little dig that an apology is not worth making unless it is sincere?

After all the calls for Mr Shatter to say sorry to Sgt McCabe, for falsely accusing him of refusing to take part in the penalty-point investigation in the Dáil, it should be remembered that two apologies had to be dragged out of him last year, to Independent TD Mick Wallace, because the first was widely seen to be — to use Leo’s phrase — “insincere.”

Mr Varadkar could hardly have been more firmly in the corner of the whistleblowers, stating at a road-safety conference: “The garda whistleblowers only released this information after they tried and failed to have their concerns addressed through official channels and proper means. They released the information in an effort to expose bad practice and protect the public.”

At the same time, Mr Kenny was away in Brussels (house-hunting?) refusing to comment on Varadkar’s re-lighting of a political fire, apart from exasperatedly noting that: “we have been over this ground on so many occasions.”

Quite right, Taoiseach, but that’s only because you, and your Minster for Justice, originally belittled the issue, then moved to denigrate the whistleblowers, before finally being shamed into reform by their brave persistence.

Mr Kenny insists, as all future presidents of the European Council do, that he has no interest in being president of the European Council, but it is a very difficult job to turn down if the collective EU leadership turns around and flatters you with it, later this year.

Even if it was offered, and if he did resist the plum EU post, Mr Kenny has to go sometime and, with Brian Hayes looking like he’s got a one-way ticked to Brussels in the Euro elections, that leaves Coveney and Varadkar as the front-runners from the next generation.

Apparently, Leo has privately expressed doubts, in the past, that he will ever be Taoiseach, but he certainly seems to have shed those feelings in Savannah.

Mr Varadkar may not have experienced any rainy nights in Georgia, but it looks like he now sees himself reigning, in his heart, as Taoiseach, whatever slick Simon says.