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profiler from another big party would join the PDs. Even if you had no interest in politics, you were reached by the dramatic tension. If you had an interest in politics, you got sucked into the latest conspiracy theory. Charlie McCreevy or Seamus Brennan were definitely going to be the next movers from Fianna Fáil, you were told.
    When McCreevy and Brennan’s posteriors stayed glued to FF seats, the explanation was that their tenure was temporary and that they’d be departing in a matter of weeks. Theories abounded, and the PDs did what Mary Harney later defined as their great strength: in media terms, they punched way above their weight.
    It figured, therefore, that Haughey’s problem related to this ongoing scenario. It did. In a tense growl, he told me that Bobby Molloy would be walking from Fianna Fáil within hours, his defection neatly timed to ensure that Charlie Haughey would be door-stepped at the entrance to (if I remember rightly) the Burlington Hotel by a phalanx of journalists wanting to get his reaction to the latest runner from the ranks.
    Haughey had wanted Tom Savage’s advice on whether he should simply walk past the media or say something to them, and if he was going to say something, what he should say.
    â€˜What’s your own instinct?’ I asked.
    The question was asked, partly because only a half-witted consultant leaps into the breach, offering advice that’s going to run counter to what the individual wants to do, before they’ve found out what exactly it is the individual wants to do. It was also playing for time. I hadn’t been paying that much attention to the progress of the PDs.
    Obviously reading from some notes, he monotoned his way through a litany of the proud history and present-day vibrancy of the Fianna Fáil party. (Whenever FF talk vibrancy, it’s a dead giveaway. They’re goosed and know it. Whenever Fine Gael talk about the need for a national debate, it’s a version of the same thing. They want two other people to argue with each other and come to the FG point of view.) ‘No,’ I said, suddenly certain. ‘No, you won’t say that.’
    â€˜I must send a strong message to the grassroots,’ he responded.
    â€˜Frig the grassroots,’ I said. ‘The grassroots you always have with you. It’s the waverers you have to reach today, and you’re not going to reach them by making those kind of predictable threatened noises.’
    With the infinite patience he could muster under pressure, he asked me what precisely I was recommending.
    â€˜No speech,’ I said. ‘No statement. You’re going to arrive at the Burlo in high good humour. You’re not going to rush past them. You’re going to get out of the car as if it was a surprise birthday party. You’re going to pick off individual journalists you know in the crowd and tease them unmercifully, by name. You’re going to make the whole lot of them laugh and while they’re laughing, you’re going to wave and disappear into the hotel.’
    â€˜I would never do that.’
    â€˜Mr Haughey, you’ll do whatever you decide. I’m just telling you what you should do.’
    The conversation ended with a growl and a banged-down phone. A few hours later, my assistant slid an evening paper in front of me.
    Big picture of the man, surrounded by microphone-holding journalists, with the caption ‘An ebullient Charlie Haughey outside the Burlington Hotel earlier today’. The impact of Molloy’s move could never be glossed over, but Haughey had at least stiffened his own party by appearing to be unbothered by this, the latest episode in a brilliantly planned wave.
    Now, the process is happening in reverse.
    The latest negative is the letter from one of the four founders of the PDs, Paul Mackay, urging members of the party to tell HQ that they had to get out of government in order to revive their fortunes.