When I resigned from the Cabinet on Portsmouth City Council - that’s the city where Mordaunt is currently an MP - over the hideous Mike Hancock debacle (on which I seem to recall she she was silent), I gave an interview to Victoria Derbyshire on 5 Live. I gave Vic a memorable quote that had traction: ‘We’re supposed to be running a city, not a game show’.
Today, Mordaunt writes in The Telegraph, ‘Our country needs stability not a soap opera’.
Oh come on. Get your own lines, mate.
Right now she’s in Parliament as ‘Leader of the Commons’, standing in for Liz Truss. It’s pathetic, like jockeying for position on a chess board that’s already at checkmate.
Here she stands, flanked by the likes of the ghastly Therese Coffey, wittering about ‘changes to the grid plan’. Starmer congratulates her on her 15 minutes as Prime Minister, and asks, ‘where is the PM?’ Mordaunt keeps a straight face. She says Starmer will never be PM. She’s actually standing up for Truss, with Coffey egging her on. Truss has ‘courage’ to make the changes. Now she’s accusing Starmer of blocking a General Election at a time of the ‘paralysis of Brexit’. ‘We’ll take no lectures’ from the Opposition … blah blah. Crazy. Crazy crazy. But then … ‘I am sorry’ and ‘that’s why we’re putting it right today’ - while nevertheless ‘agreeing’ with the braying mass of male Conservatives slagging off any MP pointing out the big mess.
We know you want to be Foreign Secretary, Penny. We know you want to be Deputy Prime Minister. We know you want to bring your peculiar brand of astrologically-feely-based identity woo to the heart of government because reasons. There’s a lot of really oddly-motivated people backing you. You have a ‘vision’ for the UK that is a blurred miasma of sociological and monetary claptrap.
You don’t have anything else to offer than a track record of churning out misinformation and cries of ‘oh no I didn’t!’ Forget soap operas - you are your own pantomime now.