first published in the 4 May 2008 Irish Mail on Sunday…

Richard Delevan
Some of us were left cheering the British election results. One result in particular. An eccentric, rumpled right-of-centre journalist openly fond of a tipple can win a big majority, high office and the power to smite the very urban annoyances that were once just so much column-fodder. Yes we can. London Mayor-elect Boris Johnson is living the dream.

Gordon Brown is living the nightmare. To lose an astounding 400-plus local council seats, to see the Labour share of the national vote shrivel to third place, to hear the whispers about your failed premiership turn into murmurs about a coup before a general election rout of epic proportions – it would be enough to dishearten even a great leader or crush one who’d earned the top job at the ballot box and not in the back room. Gordon Brown is neither. So while a comeback is certainly possible for Labour before the next Westminster election, due in two years at latest, it’s a deep hole to climb out of.

This week Brian Cowen takes the reins of government here at home. This space has noted the ominous parallels between Cowen’s own ascension to the top job and the rise of Brown. Brown has comprehensively failed to make the transition from deputy to boss. Now Britain’s voters have offered a damning initial verdict in local elections one year on. Can Brian Cowen avoid a similar fate?

Cowen enjoys considerable advantages over his British evil twin. For one thing, there is little prospect, short of economic apocalypse, of Fianna Fail dropping 20 percentage points in 12 months. Most importantly, there is no Irish version of Tory leader David Cameron waiting in the wings as an increasingly plausible, now probable, alternative leader.
That said, it wasn’t a good sign that during last week’s Dail questions even Enda Kenny was able to reduce Brian Cowen to a defensive, jargon-quoting snarl while his coalition partners examined their shoes, just by quoting the headlines.

Job losses at Dell were a symptom of eroding competitiveness, the opposition said, against a backdrop of 10-year-high unemployment, up 25% from a year ago and nearing 200,000. Cowen’s own Laois-Offaly constituency is even grimmer, with an 84% increase in jobless claims in Portlaoise and 56% in Tullamore. Mortgage rates are going up because of the credit crunch, and may continue to rise even if the ECB relaxes interest rates. The strong euro threatens to strangle exports. If that weren’t bad enough, the era of cheap food is ending, along with the era of cheap oil. Consumers can expect, for the first time in 60 years, to see the proportion of their income spent on food go up. Oil is $120 a barrel.
Prices for food, housing and energy are going up. The number of jobs is going down. Politicians crouch in the face of “rebalancing” required by globalisation. The four economic horsemen haven’t saddled up as yet, but their ponies sure are pawing the ground.

As if to demonstrate how out of touch the government is from this belt-tightening reality for most of us, ministers have deferred but will still receive a pay rise of up to €38,000 – a sum greater than the average industrial wage.
The incoming Taoiseach, Enda demanded, should set an example for the country and decline the pay increase.
Cowen, in the view of some observers, hinted he might do just that, but buried the idea in gibberish about the procedural sanctity of the pay talks. It may be that Cowen is simply waiting until he is actually in office before announcing his intention to overturn his first Bertie Ahern decision.
Even if Cowen moves swiftly after being sworn in and announces that the rapidly-escalating budget deficit, now more than €900m, never mind the moral example, means that the Cabinet pay rise is out of the question, he can only minimise the damage this is already doing. At that point, he will simply be caving in to what the trade unions, the opposition, and even business group Ibec, have all been telling him to do for weeks, in some cases months. If the ministerial pay rise issue is allowed to fester even longer, or is seen as a bargaining chip to be used at the national pay talks, Cowen will look weak. However unfair, the commentary will run to two explanations. Either he’s not strong enough to get Cabinet consensus about a change and won’t risk annoying his new lieutenants, or that he’s too out of touch to think it’s an issue. If he does give up the pay rise, he’ll still take the hit.
When Brian Cowen makes his maiden speeches as Taoiseach, to the Dail, the people and the social partners, he has his best chance to set the tone and agenda for his administration and avoid the Brown blunders. If he doesn’t get this pay rise issue off the table, right away, he’ll never regain the initiative and he’ll be on the slippery slope.

Next week he will have our attention, a precious and rare moment. People are nervous. We want to know things. What does Cowen want to accomplish? What matters to him? How will his administration differ from Bertie Ahern’s, and can he make this pivot while simultaneously paying tribute to Bertie? Will he simply lay out a laundry list of unaffordable goodies for every constituency he can think of? What can he do to nurture the economy when corporate tax is at bottom, the value of the euro and interest rates are out of our control and we look on nervously as the US economy slides further as worldwide commodity prices skyrocket?
The only way to avoid disaster is for Brian Cowen to begin telling a new story for Ireland. That the export-led high-growth Celtic Tiger is dead and the property-fuelled Zombie Celtic Tiger is bestilled are old news. Bertie’s coda before the US Congress - Ireland at peace and prosperous - is the happy ending of that story, whatever its bittersweet undertones of challenges ahead.

If Brian Cowen promises to maintain the status quo as its facade crumbles around us, if he promises more giveaways without responsibility while railing at people “talking down the economy”, his term as Taoiseach will have failed before it begins. An honest story of renewal won’t be an easy one to sell, but he’s got to try. Or it will be someone else’s job soon enough.

The task of leadership is ultimately one of storytelling, and political competition comes down to competing narratives. It’s something Enda & Co. can’t seem to get their heads around. The most powerful imagery from Enda’s 2007 pre-election conference speech evoked his grandfather, a lighthouse-keeper: “He kept his contract and he used it to look out for people, to make their journey better, to bring them safely home.”

But the natural state of a body politic is not at rest but in motion. The leader is a pilot, not standing above in a tall tower on a distant shore. Where is Ireland headed now? For Brian Cowen to avoid what happened to Gordon Brown last week, he needs to tell us. He needs to make us feel it’s a place we want to go and that he’s the man to take us there.

Otherwise, there are plenty of journalists who’d love to take his place.
www.richarddelevan.com
ENDS