‘What I have to say to you today is not for the faint-hearted,’ Penny Mordaunt said as she opened the final session of the Conservative conference. She didn’t have a sword as a prop, but the leader of the House of Commons spent much of her address calling on activists to ‘stand up and fight’ in the face of the polling, the ‘sneering’ from the commentators and the Labour party.
The theme of the speech was standing up to bullies, taking in her own personal experience of watching the Falklands Taskforce leaving Portsmouth, and Britain’s identity in fighting the Nazis and being part of ending the Cold War. The tone of it was classic Mordaunt: well-delivered, funny and easily written-up as a leadership pitch.
Mordaunt moved round to the front of the lectern for a rousing passage on freedom and the risk of what would happen ‘if we fail to win a general election’.
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