GAVAN REILLY: Is Leo really a diplomatic liability when he’s abroad?

Another trip over, another overnight transatlantic flight to make it onto radio (never again!), and another alleged gaffe by Leo Varadkar alongside his visit to the White House. This time it was a joke to a group of future Washington interns, saying that when he’d served his own internship in 2000 it was a time when parents feared what happened to Washington interns – an obvious reference to the Lewinsky scandal.

Perhaps in Varadkar’s head, comments like these aren’t so embarrassing because they’re not meant for a domestic audience. Take for example the comments in 2018 when he jokingly insinuated that he’d managed to help Donald Trump secure planning permission in Doonbeg. The idea that a Taoiseach would admit to a prima facie case of screwing the system was evidently absurd, and his meaning was perfectly clear to those in the room.

The 2023 remark about interns might have been in the same category (full disclosure: I didn’t see it in person, as the event clashed with one of our news bulletins so I was off reporting live). So too was the 2017 joke in Downing Street about being disappointed that Hugh Grant’s dancing scene in Love Actually wasn’t actually filmed there – remember, the joke came just after Varadkar had witnessed the building’s legendary pokiness in real life.

The problem of course is that remarks abroad are consumed by a domestic audience too, and the mood in the room isn’t always understood. Still, though, you’d think after this many years in the job that Varadkar would have learned not to follow the instinct of cracking a joke to please the locals when it might be taken up wrongly back at home.

There was certainly some confusion – and bemusement – among the Taoiseach’s own travelling team at a newspaper suggestion he had caused ‘fury’ by ‘snubbing’ an audience of major investors. Varadkar actually met the group; the apparent issue is whether he should have accepted an invite to stay longer than planned to schmooze with them.

The Taoiseach’s diary is micromanaged at the best of times, even more so on a foreign trip where appointments are lined up specifically to maximise the value of the traveller’s time. Whether it was right for Varadkar to stick to his diary is subjective, but objectively it’s hard to claim the investors were ‘snubbed’ when Varadkar actually met with them.

By the by: Joe Biden almost certainly won’t be running for a second term as President. Biden was barely audible in the Oval Office when making his opening remarks to Varadkar, to the point where the TV broadcasters were frantic afterwards, trying to find a microphone that had picked up his comments with any kind of clarity at all – it was almost as if he was whispering. Later, at the shamrock reception in the East Room, while the microphones built into the podium were enough to carry Leo Varadkar’s voice, Biden needed a handheld mic pressed right to his mouth in order to be heard. He was lucky that the 2020 campaign coincided with Covid restrictions that allowed him to campaign from his basement; the next will be a frantic coast-to-coast marathon for a man about to turn 82.