Who does Truss trust? Has Mordaunt done enough by coming out in ‘support’ of the clear race favourite to have wheedled her way onto the list of future secretaries of state and ministers? Could Mordaunt - god forbid - be re-appointed as Minister for Women & Equalities, as she possibly desires?
If Liz Truss has any political and common sense left at all, after a deranged start to the Conservative leadership contest, her response to Mordaunt’s offer of ‘support’ will be, ‘thanks, but no thanks, now feck off’.
What Does Mordaunt Bring to the Party?
What indeed? According to Westminster tittle-tattle she is ‘nice’ and ‘popular in the tea-rooms’. Backbenchers seem to enjoy her company. Down in her constituency in Portsmouth, she has been variously described as ‘nice’ (that bloody word again - what does it even mean of a serious politician?) ‘good’, ‘our girl’, ‘dishonest’ and ‘U-turning’. Perhaps she has been more adept at courting backbenchers and her local selection committee than working hard for her constituents?
Her entry into the leadership race, which saw her set her sights on Prime Ministerial office, had the effect of drawing sharper and more serious criticisms of her record and her convictions. These included a withering take-down of Mordaunt’s time in the Women & Equalities portfolio by a leading member of Conservatives For Women, which alleges:
When she was Minister for Women and Equalities, overseeing the Government Equalities Office during 2018 and 2019, Penny Mordaunt presided over an organisation captured by gender ideology. The output of the GEO under her watch spread gender ideology across public institutions. In doing so it undermined science, free speech, established language, women's rights, and the safeguarding of the vulnerable. The fightback from grassroots women has since consumed untold energy.
Credit: The Guardian
This, read in tandem with Kemi Badenoch’s piece for the Sunday Times last weekend, represents someting of a political evisceration.
There were also allegations that her apparent popularity was illusory, based on votes ‘lent’ to Mordaunt behind the scenes in an attempt to manipulate the final shortlists of four, three and two. At one point in the contest Mark Harper, the former chief whip backing Rishi Sunak, was forced to issue a statement of denial. ‘Harper said there had been no dirty tricks from Sunak’s campaign or votes lent to other candidates’ reported the Guardian’s Jessica Elgot, immediately fuelling speculation that this was exactly what had been happening, as no-one could properly explain Mordaunt’s popularity.
Mordaunt’s Track Record
Everything from her perceived loyalties, her abilities and judgement in Cabinet and government roles, her dedication (or not) to ‘gender identity ideology’, and her attitude to work on leaving the European Union, have been scrutinised in a pulverising way. Mordaunt has had her honesty, integrity and work ethic called into question in a brutal fashion.
Here are my Top 20, in no particular order.
[Liz Truss’s] campaign chair, Steve Baker, has been dismissive of Mordaunt for staying in the cabinet under Theresa May and voting for the Brexit deal (see eg the Guardian).
The accusation that she ‘lied’ about Turkey, the EU and the UK’s veto have been resurrected, showing her in a less than flattering light. One such recent critic was no less than Michael Lake (former EU ambassador to Turkey and EU official and diplomat 1973-2001), who accused her plainly of ‘falsehoods’.
To date, she has stayed in the government under Boris Johnson as a minister of state, no matter what he does or what transpires about him and his premiership. (See Parliament.uk for her up-to-date formal role title.)
David Frost, the former Brexit negotiator, accused Mordaunt of performing incompetently as his deputy to the point where he asked the prime minister to shift her to another role (see eg Tom Quinn, The Conversation).
Mordaunt allegedly missed a trade visit to the USA in her role as a minister in order to fly in a helicoper to promote her jointly-authored (and not very good) book to the Hay festival, earning her the nickname of ‘Part-time Penny’. (See eg the Daily Mail.)
There are questions about who Mordaunt has accepted money from as recently as 2020, such as a ‘climate sceptic lobby group’ (see eg The National, Scotland).
Her voting record in parliament shows a number of voting decisions and strategic absences that make it difficult to pin down her actual convictions on the environment. For example last year Mordaunt voted against an amendment that would have required firms to stop discharges - a huge problem in the waters around Portsmouth - and this year she voted against measures to punish firms when animals die in polluted water. (See eg The Guardian.)
Her Prime Ministerial campaign launch video was widely ridiculed, and had to be immediately re-edited to remove many unwilling participants as well as the convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius (see eg the Guardian).
Her position on gender identity ideology changes with the winds of her own political fortunes, again giving the impression that she has no genuine convictions about anything. A whole tranche of Conservative members are just learning about these matters and what she has been responsible for, and her former gender ideology pals now see her as a traitor to the purity. (See eg Tom Quinn, The Conversation.) This kind of twisting and turning saw the hashtag #PinicchioPenny trending on Twitter in mid-July 2022.
During the leadership campaign Mordaunt claimed that she had instigated an inquiry into the Tavistock’s ‘gender identity’ clinic. However, she didn’t. The inquiry that finally was set in motion by Matt Hancock resulted in the Cass Review. The clinic is now being shut down having been deemed ‘not safe’ for children. I wrote an online article in 2019 about the ‘brewing safeguarding scandal’ and sent it to her; but I never even received an acknowledgment from her or her office, despite having known her for nine years. (See also Caroline ffiske of Conservatives For Women’s very illuminating account.)
Mordaunt was also criticised during the leadership contest by her own colleagues for opting to replace the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ with ‘person’ in legislation that allowed her leadership rival Suella Braverman to go on maternity leave (see eg Sky News).
Kemi Badenoch subsequently has had quite a lot to say about the terrible state in which she found the government’s Equalities portfolio in 2020. Badenoch and her boss Truss, followed on from Mordaunt in that office. (See eg the Daily Mail, which references the original paywalled Sunday Times article.)
Penny Mordaunt’s ‘Mumsnet webchat’ is widely regarded as one of the worst in history, and that’s a pretty low bar when it comes to politicians. (See also: Maya Forstater blog.) Mordaunt knows there has been disquiet around this performance for over three years.
Mordaunt can’t seem to decide what got her into politics in the first place. On the one hand, she attributed her interest in politics to her experiences whilst working in hospitals and orphanages of Romania in the aftermath of 1989; on the other, she more recently declared ‘she knew she was a conservative as soon as she watched Margaret Thatcher’s naval task force sail from Portsmouth Harbour as the Falklands War began in 1982. The ships, the uniforms, the flags. Mordaunt saw the pomp and the guns, and her thoughts turned to Westminster’. (See eg her Wiki entry note 16 referencing the Evening Standard; and unHerd.)
Mordaunt’s backstory that she has told about herself in her time as a politician, including when her name was being bandied about as a prime minister material, is of course under increased scrutiny. It’s the same for Truss and Sunak. I don’t like ‘humble origin’ stories and this is why: you invade other people’s privacy and set up more questions than answers. In an article for Sky News, Lara Keay repeats Mordaunt’s comment to the Sunday Times in 2019 that, as a teenager, after the death of her mother: ‘you're trying to deal with all of that and study, run a house, look after two brothers’. (See eg - Sky News.) One of these brothers is her twin. Why would she need to ‘look after’ her twin brother? Because he was male? I’m pretty sure he has his own agency.
Mordaunt’s supposedly stellar ‘navy career’ (spoiler: she didn’t have one) and her ‘fighting in the navy’ (spoiler: she didn’t) have been repeatedly questioned and even ridiculed (see eg the Daily Mail).
It’s not easy to find fans of her previous executive positions in, say, charities. In fact it’s not easy to find fans of her work in quite a lot of her very many previous roles and appointments. I do not know why this is.
The reason she gave for appearing on the reality TV show ‘Splash!’ is a tad disingenuous. She says it was to give the fee - £10k - to the Hilsea Lido in her constituency. Thing is, the Lido wouldn’t have needed the funding if her Conservative government hadn’t massively slashed the government grants to city councils like Portsmouth in the first place. And £10k didn’t touch the sides of what the Council and the Lido supporters needed to do in terms of refurb and running costs.
She knows Boris Johnson. She eats 99s with Boris Johnson.
Credit: Sky News
20. And finally, on a personal note, I feel that Penny Mordaunt insulted me as a post-surgical female patient by tweeting, ‘I am biologically a woman. If I have a hysterectomy or mastectomy, I am still a woman’ (see eg the Guardian). Yes, Penny, I fecking know that, you absolutely offensive muppet. Did you think that I thought they cut out my sex chromosomes?
Can Mordaunt Be Unseated in Portsmouth North?
Could Mordaunt lose her seat in a General Election? She currently has a majority of 15,780. I did witness her lose in 2005 to Sarah McCarthy-Fry (Labour) - I was in the Guildhall for the count that night - and watched as Mordaunt first won in 2010. Her Labour opponents since then have been bewilderingly under-supported, or problematic in their own right on the gender woo front. Ditto the 3rd horse in the race, the Liberal Democrat candidate, who cannot catch up.
While not a ‘red wall’ seat by any means it could, like any Conservative constituency, tumble away from an unpopular Conservative candidate under an unpopular Prime Minister. But who even knows what ‘unpopular’ is these days, when all decency is up for auction, poverty is being deliberately and knowingly threaded through the UK as a built-in feature, and activist civil servants waste time and money with their luxury beliefs. What on earth has grassroots Conservatism become under ministers like Mordaunt? This MP and those like her really are the ‘looney right’, pretending to be moderate because they play at ‘nice’ when they’re actually bloody dangerous.
One thing’s for certain - Labour needs to do better in Portsmouth North. It cannot expect voters to bother to register to vote and turn out to vote if it tries to replace Penny Mordaunt with another Penny Mordaunt in a red rosette with equally retractable principles. Why would women like me, who will actually drag our arses to the polling station or fill in that postal ballot, vote for politicians who appear to be the antithesis of suffragist feminism? Don’t patronise me about my chromosomes. Trust me, I live with them.
It’s astounding to me that between 2018 and 2019, Mordaunt was so wantonly able to rip up the Conservative rule-book under the guise of ‘being nice’. It was truly the ship of fools, led by a ludicrous naval reservist without a single meaningful conviction to fall back on.
And Liz Truss is probably stupid enough to give her a job in the Cabinet.