‘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’.
‘Make no mistake,’ she thundered. ‘What will happen if we fail to win a general election and the biggest threat of all is that the sons and daughters of Scargill are ready for a rematch of the battle of the 1980s: no less than the repeal of all the reforms and freedoms we have brought in, aided and abetted by Labour, fuelled by the politics of envy, identity and class hatred. Outdated, dogmatic irrelevance to the needs to the people.’
The theme of the speech was standing up to bullies
She talked about ‘people who want to turn the BMA into the NUM’, the ‘iron fist’, and the parallels between Birmingham City Council today and Liverpool in the 1980s.
‘I do not trust the leadership of Keir Starmer to be able to stand up to the iron fist. Why? Because he is not even capable of standing up to Mark Drakeford!’ The conference loved it.
She then gave us a preview of the campaign that the Tories will wage against Starmer, reminding voters that he sat in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and ‘watched while colleagues of Jewish heritage were driven from his party’. She said the Labour leader had pretended to be Corbyn, to be Kinnock and ‘now in Act Three, he wants you all to believe he’s Tony Blair’.
The line we have been hearing more and more this week, because it is something that the Conservatives have been picking up in focus groups, was this: ‘Starmer will do anything and say anything to win an election.’
This conference has been dominated by two questions about the future. The future of HS2 has followed Rishi Sunak around the event, and up to now, he has refused to answer it. The future of the Conservative Party and who might lead it if it loses the next election has been the key question on the fringe. Mordaunt has already had a tilt at the leadership, and in her speech today she had spoke as though she was in a much more senior position within the government than she is, as though she was in charge of the election campaign rather than the Leader of the House. Activists were as energised as it is possible to be when most of them still expect to lose. Whether many of the cabinet are really pouring as much effort into actually fighting the next election as Mordaunt put into her speech this morning is another question.
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