The problem with Penny

I’ve been thinking for the past couple of days about who can beat Penny Mordaunt in the contest to be the next Tory leader. Despite the shaky start to her campaign, I still think she’s the favourite. Rishi Sunak has too many people trying to stop him; most importantly, a lot of the membership. Truss has too many detractors within the parliamentary party (although she could possibly overcome this and win). Kemi Badenoch is a real possibility but has a lot of ground to make up during the course of the contest. The rest are either too underbaked, have too much baggage, or are beset by other issues.

Mordaunt’s appeal is pretty obvious: she’s articulate and outwardly confident. She hits a sweet spot between being pretty Brexit-y without being weird about it while also possessing some more traditional Tory instincts. I also don’t buy the recent notion that she’s secretly woke either; the idea that she would get into office and immediately abolish women-only spaces isn’t credible. None of the candidates is that way inclined. 

Yet Penny Mordaunt has a fatal flaw: she has few solid beliefs and is mostly happy to publicly say whatever she thinks is expected of her in any given situation. She no doubt cares deeply about this country, as well as its armed forces, but beyond that, there don’t seem to be any deeper convictions. This leads her to say things that often stretch credulity. Take the recent ‘trade deal’ with the US state, Indiana, about which Mordaunt wrote:

The left are at it again on the subject of a Free Trade Agreement with the US. They ignore that we have completed five rounds of negotiations at a federal level. They say of our state level efforts: ‘Individual states cannot sign trade agreements.’ They can.

Except, Penny, they can’t. What the discussions held between the UK Department for International Trade and the state of Indiana produced in the end was a memorandum of understanding which was mostly about ambition more than anything else. It certainly was not a ‘trade deal’, which by definition is something that is legally binding and reduces tariffs and non-tariff barriers. What was struck between the UK and Indiana does none of this. Most crucially, it could have been done while the UK was still a member of the European Union. The minimum a Brexit benefit should entail is something Britain couldn’t have done as a member of the EU.

Now, if you believe Brexit was about Britain striking out on its own and getting new trade deals, the way this was pitched by Mordaunt ought to make you angry. If there is a sea of actual trade deals to be had with the rest of the world, why trust someone who tries to pass off a glorified jobs fair as a great trade deal? If what upset you about Boris Johnson’s government is that they never took advantage of the benefits that Brexit provided, why would you trust a Penny Mordaunt government to do so when she is happy to talk about things as Brexit benefits that could have been done within the EU?

What is and is not a trade deal might sound pedantic to some, but it’s not, particularly if you believe in Brexit. After all, Brexiteers wanted the UK to have sovereignty back, much of which was about finding our own trade arrangements instead of having the EU create those arrangements for us. Given that, we ought to be mindful of how that sovereignty is – and how it is not – being used by our government. If you want Brexit to work, get someone who actually has a plan for it and – crucially – will be honest about every turn in the road and won’t try and convince us rubbish is gold. You know, like telling you a memorandum of understanding with a US state amounts to a ‘trade deal’.