At the time of writing, a #PinnochioPenny is trending on Twitter, and she’s getting an absolute pasting on one of the biggest talk board websites in the world, Mumsnet. To understand this, it’s worth looking at a bit of the history involved.
Penny Mordaunt is most famous on MN for her disastrous webchat in 2019, where she badly fucked up her answers to questions about (a) women, (b) children, and (c) our exit from the EU. So, that’s most of the population and current politics of the UK she couldn’t deal with, then.
I link to all of my blog pieces arising from the webchat below.
A Problem Of Honesty
Mordaunt’s problem now with building a bridge back from Tory Central to women and the children they safeguard, is the wall of disbelief she faces. Her campaign video launch a few days ago was an amateurish debacle - it seems that many people featured hadn’t given their consent to be in it. She’s tried to claim credit for a review into children’s medical well-being that is actually someone else’s work, because she failed to get on with it in 2018. She says she didn’t attempt to take the word ‘mother’ out of maternity legislation in 2021, yet several sources close to government say that’s untrue. (I actually watched the whole thing unfold in the Lords and the Commons, including her performance live at the Despatch Box.)
There’s other disingenuous nonsense. Some of us well remember her scaremongering and sensationalist bollocks during her interview with Andrew Marr in 2016, about Turkey supposedly joining the EU and the UK not having a veto - WRONG - and it’s something that she’s still banging on about, as she vies for the leadership of the Conservative Party. #PinocchioPenny indeed.
Andrew Marr and Penny Mordaunt (Credits: BBC and Daily Mail)
Very many MN users, whose day jobs include journalism, academia, medicine, the civil service, politics and social media, are pissed off with this historical revision. Not only do they have long and accurate memories (and the ‘receipts’), but they make it their job to repeat such tales like epic narratives down through the months and years. Legends of political webchats in particular tend to cycle through generations of site users, of which MN has millions per month. MN is not Jam and Jerusalem where the Guild wants a lovely talk with slides from the nice lady in the blue jacket. MN has many talk boards and a significant number of them have created an intensely political space - a place where women are fighting for their rights not to be taken away by politicians like Mordaunt and her supporter Maria Miller MP.
Waves to Maya
Mordaunt’s webchat is how and where I ‘met’ (virtually) Maya Forstater. (If you’re in politics and you don’t know who Maya is, you really haven’t been paying attention.) Maya and I watched, independently, the Mordaunt webchat unfold and both blogged about it. We exchanged a couple of messages. I finished my piece first and she linked to it in hers.
Maya also wrote an article for the Independent about the webchat debacle, and I was delighted to see it in the mainstream media. Penny Mordaunt was proving to be yet another woeful Minister for Women & Equalities when it came down to the brass tacks of women’s rights and children’s safeguarding, and the more sunlight the better.
The Blog Articles
And so I started to write about Penny Mordaunt. First, on March 14th, I wrote that piece about Penny Mordaunt’s webchat: Did Mumsnet Just Hand Penny Mordaunt Her Arse? (I used a different title for some online linkages that didn’t have ‘arse’ in it, but it’s the same article.)
Then I took a look at Penny Mordaunt’s other shenagians, because I realised then that there’s an honesty and credibility issue with this politician that is getting really serious. So on March 16th, I produced this blog piece: Did Mumsnet Catch Out Penny Mordaunt Over Turkey ‘Lies’?
By April 8th I’d done some research into her comments on the ‘GIDS’ service for children at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and saw a massive children’s safeguarding scandal brewing. I wrote this: Penny Mordaunt, THAT Mumsnet Webchat, and a Brewing Children’s Safeguarding Scandal. I still think it’s a scandal, and it’s most definitely brewing - via the courts. We also have the ongoing Cass Review, established in late 2020 and chaired by paediatrician Dr Hillary Cass, really drilling down into this scandal and who was responsible. THERE WAS NO INQUIRY SET UP BY PENNY MORDAUNT IN 2018.
On May 2nd, fed up to the back teeth of her schmoozing into safe spots away from the media scrutiny she richly deserved, I wrote this: Penny Mordaunt, Defence Secretary - Has Theresa May Replaced One Gaffe-Prone ‘Liar’ with Another?
I’ve never received a single message from her about any of these pieces, nor any comment from any of her staff or colleagues, a few of whom I know quite well through my Council days.
I grow ever more disillusioned. Penny Mordaunt slips and wriggles with words and denials, and no-one can pin down what she thought in 2019 and what she thinks now. Has she changed her position on, say, clashes of rights, or did she never really think or believe all the things she said in the first place?
I’ll give the final word to MN user ‘Sidaway’:
I wouldn't mind so much if she actually admitted she's changed her mind - we're all human, it happens.
But she hasn't admitted that - she trying to rewrite her own history and hoping that no-one notices. So I don't trust her.