The departure of our greatest living economist/economic expert/economic correspondent on television news…

Okay, so Fine Gael were pushed to the precipice, Enda Kenny (who I saw walking by very recently just before all this broke and I must admit struck me as a man carrying the weight of the troubles of the world, or the peculiar math of the Fine Gael front bench. And to paraphrase the old Frank Cluskey gag – which option would be the tougher one?) a millimeter or two ahead of the rest of the pack. One look down though and I suspect they realised that if he went chances are they’d all be following close behind, because while the public may (and God knows I’ve never heard a telephone poll with 16,000 responses in ten minutes paraded as the truth dragged down from the mountain like it was on Joe Duffy and later Pat Kenny on Frontline – like, Pat, y’think that’s rigorous enough?) be ululating today and tomorrow over the departure of our greatest living economist/economic expert/economic correspondent on television news one is probably correct to assume that adding to the sense of panic that briefly engendered may not be the wisest course of action for our supposedly most sober and polite of political parties. And maybe, at root, they recognised one salient fact. It wasn’t just Kenny, or indeed Bruton, but them all who were given the lash.

So, Kenny lives to fight another day. And perhaps despite the current gloom some of that weight has been lifted from his shoulders. Particularly if the Lee love-in with the public turns sour. Now it may be pure coincidence, but the letters page of the IT was filled with rather more critical contributions. Which makes it strangely entertaining reading the articles on George Lee in the same edition of the paper and seeing how they pick gingerly between the various facts of the matter.

And let me also say that in the past twenty four hours having spoken to various people and pols from FF, FG, Labour and points of the political compass beyond those the amount of sympathy for “our greatest living…” is minimal to none.

And, there’s little doubt that the facts are problematic and will, perhaps grow increasingly so for the reputation of “our greatest living etc…” Let’s recount those facts.

Firstly Lee was a wet weekend in the job. Secondly that he had unreasonable expectations. Thirdly that yes, he had an excellent vote share, but that, given the constituency he ran in that was close to a no-brainer – and sure, he got more than the combined votes of the other candidates, but… so what? Is Dublin South somehow the lynchpin of our democracy, the votes there in some way energised to a greater extent than any other? Fourth that his economic expertise has been wildly overhyped.

But of course they can’t quite come out and say any of that because to do so would kill the story dead – man finds he doesn’t like politics and in no-lose situation returns to old employer – and remove a handy stick with which to chastise Fine Gael in the first instance and Irish political life in the second. In these depoliticised and populist times that would never do.

Still, credit where credit is due, the Irish Times editorial actually isn’t too much of an ‘on the one hand, on the other’ balancing act. Indeed Lee reading that today might well have cause to wonder at the wisdom of his actions… he is indeed described as ‘a major political acquisition’...but… ‘Mr Lee had unreasonable expectations’…’Mr Lee was naive if he believed that he could be offered the portfolio of Richard Bruton’ [and one suspects that RB has a symbolic cachet around the IT – wbs]…’The resignation of Mr Lee, a political prima donna’…’Mr Lee can be comforted in the knowledge that he made a financially risk-free decision’…’He can hardly write independently about economic matters for a while’... indeed, is this last the Irish Times calling for a period of exile? “But, Charlie Bird is returning from Washington and the time may be opportune for Mr Lee to serve abroad”.

There are balancing issues, most importantly one of which Fintan O’Toole amongst others picked up. For many many people Lee’s perfectly honed reputation as an honest and impartial purveyor of the economic truth above and beyond the shabby deceits of politics (all politics let’s be clear, both left and right) gave him a profile out of all proportion probably to any one else that they would know and hear of, or more particularly, see. His Cassandra like pronouncements were taken as the final word on the matter. And in this televisual age, for many they were.

That, in a sense, is Lee’s trump card. But how effective it is remains to be seen.

And that effectivity is in many ways impacted by the, at times, quite extraordinary nature of Lee as a personality. Even Elaine Byrne in the Irish Times in a broadly sympathetic piece which tries to stitch together a fairly unconvincing narrative about ‘conservative political way of doing things’ (can she offer us examples of rags to riches rises in other polities? Perhaps but she doesn’t bother to) notes that:

The failure of Kenny and his advisers to adequately accommodate Lee’s sense of self-importance will no doubt saturate newspaper pages obsessed with personality politics in the coming days.

A ‘sense of self-importance’. Consider that. What came over to me on Frontline last night loud and strong was a sense that he believed that this was his opportunity to shine and that in two or three years that would be gone as the situation stabilised. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Except one has the feeling that in his head that particular configuration was reversed. Such a self-belief borders on the risible.

And worse, and this I’d be cautious about presenting, but it seems to me that it does have some utility, a sense of entitlement that is really very very middle class indeed. It wasn’t that he would be a shrinking violet, or hide beneath a facade of modesty. No indeed. He knew that he was the man, again as expressed on Frontline, who was absolutely vital to correcting the course of the ship of state (to which Ivan Yeats made a delayed, but still perfectly cogent, point that that being the case why not join Fianna Fáil?). There was nothing more to it. Fine Gael, already with a significant economic heavyweight in situ (one who had actually served in Cabinet as Minister of Enterprise and Employment) had to stand back and accept this.

This near messianic belief – as Brian Lenihan almost put it (and let’s be clear, it’s a grim day in Irish politics when Lenihan and Yeats are both right – but as we shall see it gets grimmer), is so odd in and of itself to those of us who have toiled with policy programmes and party platforms as to be near incomprehensible. And it truly is a naive view of politics that believes this is something that is amenable to rapid change. This is a society, economy and polity we are talking about. The equivalent of a supertanker, taking kilometers to stop, let alone change direction. And that’s assuming that there were any particularly striking alternatives to be posited by Lee.

Because truth is, whether as some mutterings I hear suggest that Bruton may have been the real problem, Lee was remarkably economic in actually presenting any of these much vaunted ideas. Or as Michael Taft points out, either FG had adopted his original ones, or the government had implemented them.

So we must take his word for it that he was the right man in the right place with the right ideas shoddily wronged by a party that just didn’t ‘get’ him… and that he was the man, just because… Now, I don’t often have a kind word for FG as an entity, albeit I have considerable respect for some within it, but in this instance more sinned against than sinning seems the most reasonable analysis (and let me add that Leo Varadkar was the only one to notice that Lee’s staff will now be… er… unemployed).

And a further irony is that Lee, for all the protestations of thwarted excellence, and cries of outrage from his fans, reminds one not so much of a white hot technocrat as a much more traditional stereotype from our political heritage. From that cue the outrage of the polite and the indifferent and the apolitical and the populist. Always seeking non-revolutionary revolutions, shortcuts and rapid solutions. And if nine months was too long for him, well, it’s too long for them, for those who genuinely thought ‘he was going to change our country’ as one constituent put it.

It’s not what he did really, so much as what he is meant to symbolise, for the truth is that in the nine months he was there he did very little indeed. And while that may in part be the fault of Enda Kenny and Fine Gael, there’s little doubt that he must take a major share of the blame as one of but 166 individuals in this state with the most privileged of platforms.

For a similar view on this with the finest possible title… and this isn’t bad either… particularly on the dynamic which led to FG misunderstanding who and what Lee represented.