When former taoiseach Leo Varadkar used to put his foot in it as a politician, there was an entire infrastructure around him to mitigate the damage. When he generated controversy, staff poured water on fires he had a tendency to start out of nowhere; cabinet and parliamentary colleagues went out to bat for him.

There was his leaking of a proposed GP contract agreed with the Irish Medical Organisation to his then friend who was president of a rival organisation as well as his attendance at a UK music festival, while there on business, during Covid-19 on the same weekend Electric Picnic should have taken place at home but didn’t due to the pandemic.

That supporting damage control infrastructure is gone now. When Varadkar recently spoke far too loosely on a podcast in a divisive manner unnecessarily pitting people against each other by geography while diminishing the importance of farming to Ireland, politicians did not jump to his defence. In fact, the opposite happened.

At a chaotic moment for the Coalition in the aftermath of the fuel blockades, the last thing Fine Gael needed was Varadkar in his podcast era becoming a thorn in its side, just as prince Harry and Meghan Markle have to the royal family. They must have thought: please say less.

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