It’s an astonishing political journey by any measure — after just ten years in the Dáil Leo Varadkar has risen from opposition backbencher to the Department of the Taoiseach.
An outspoken yet enigmatic TD, he has always had the drive and determination to move quickly up the ranks, and he has never allowed his youth or inexperience to blunt his ambition. His immediately recognisable surname has made him into something of a brand in recent years but he has had to work on his social skills.
“He wasn’t always easy company, not exactly the type of guy to have a pint with,” one party colleague said.
“Of course that all changed as soon as he came out. He was like a new man, comfortable in his own skin and even a bit more human.”
Having been fiercely protective of his private life, Mr Varadkar made the decision in January 2015 to tell the public that he was gay, but he didn’t want the revelation to define him. “I’m not a half-Indian politician, or a doctor politician or a gay politician, for that matter. It’s just part of who I am,” he said in an RTÉ interview with Miriam O’Callaghan.
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The Dublin West TD considers himself more of a young reformer in the cast of President Macron of France or Justin Trudeau of Canada. He is a conservative Europhile who is globally minded but does not adhere to the traditional labels of left or right.
Instead he wants Fine Gael to be a broad church that welcomes those from across the political spectrum.
He was born in Dublin in 1979 to a doctor from India and a nurse and farmer’s daughter from Co Waterford, and is the youngest of three children.
His parents met in England while working in the same NHS hospital. Ashok and Miriam Varadkar had two daughters, Sophia and Sonia, in the UK and built a life there. By 1973 his mother had realised that she wanted to raise her family in Ireland, so they came home before Leo was born, settling in Castleknock, a suburb in of west of Dublin.
Although his father was Hindu, the family raised their children as Catholics, something that Mr Varadkar has said he is grateful for as it meant he was not singled out as a foreigner in his own country.
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He also believes that being the son of the local doctor insulated him from the kind of overt racism that he might have expected at the time.
He has described his early life as idyllic, and although he was never a rebel he was a deep thinker and a bright student.
After leaving school he started a law course but after getting some subjects from his Leaving Cert rechecked he was awarded extra points and was accepted to study medicine at Trinity College Dublin.
Following in his father’s footsteps was a natural decision, he has said, and his sisters also entered the family business. Sophia is a consultant paediatric neurologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, while Sonia works as a midwife in Dublin.
Despite enjoying his medical training, Mr Varadkar felt that something was missing from his life. “I loved medicine but I always thought that there was something else I needed to do, so I chose public service,” he said recently.
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He chose to join Fine Gael. He made his way up through ranks of the party, dropping leaflets, putting up posters and even canvassing as a fresh-faced student at the age of 20 for Simon Coveney, who was contesting a seat in a by-election in Cork South-Central in 1998. The following year he got the opportunity to run for a local council in the Dublin West Constituency.
He got an early lesson in politics, losing out badly, but used the experience to propel him to victory five years later when he won almost 5,000 votes. By 2007 he was ready to contest a Dáil seat.
Fine Gael had rebuilt itself after an electoral meltdown in 2002 and had invested heavily in young candidates that could win the party seats in areas where they were not represented.
Vying to be elected in one of the toughest constituencies in the Dáil, he was up against Brian Lenihan of Fianna Fáil, Joan Burton of Labour and Joe Higgins, the veteran Socialist TD.
“The pundits didn’t give me much of a chance but I took the second seat,” he said.
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Throughout his years in the Dáil he has been known as a maverick and firebrand, often shooting from the lip before thinking of the consequences.
His remarks during the 2011 general election that the bailed-out banks would not be given “another red cent” would become a consistent jeer from the opposition when the promise was broken.
The impressionist Oliver Callan’s radio pastiche of Mr Varadkar lampoons him as vain and calculating, someone who has shaped his entire life around becoming taoiseach.
He is better defined as a political idealist or as the metropolitan voice of the millennials. The generational change that he will usher in as taoiseach could modernise the country, or it could mark an unwelcome gear change in an economy tentatively entering recovery.
He would argue the former.