Rebellious Tory MPs, expecting a trouncing in Thursday’s locals, are apparently mooting a ‘100 days to save Britain!’ emergency turnaround strategy. A new leader, a payrise for doctors, defence spending up to 3 per cent. Having four prime ministers in one parliamentary term would be good for future pub quizzes, but who is apparently choice for that number four slot? Penny Mordaunt. To what problem is she the solution?
Her worst quality is that she will follow whatever is fashionable or socially expedient, not her own judgement.
Mordaunt is a model example of style over substance. And what style! Because she looks just right – the mane, the steely glare, the confident manner, the military uprightness. There is something of a carved ship’s figurehead about her, an aurora of Thatcher (though Mordaunt is a much more natural public speaker) and, through her, a link to a Jungian archetype – Juno, Boadicea, Elizabeth Taylor. She is what my father used to call a very handsome woman.
But beneath the gloss? Everything falls apart. Because Penny Mordaunt just isn’t very good. She talks a good fight, yes. But she was not visible in any of her previous political jobs. (Or even present in them for a great deal of the time, according to some of her Tory detractors.) Is there any thinking or purpose there? To answer that we can turn to her terrible 2021 book, Greater: Britain After The Storm, in which she set out her scheme to ‘modernise’ the nation using exactly the same centrist candy floss that has bedevilled it since 1997, and got us into this mess. This includes Obama-ish banalities like ‘change is the engine room of equality’, or ‘minority achievement is the stuff of which our dreams, history, and culture are made’.
Then there was her bizarre claim during the leadership debate of 2022 that the NHS wasn’t using any of the top 180 medical innovations. (Some think that she may have misread a press release from a firm called 180 Innovations.) Making Mordaunt PM is like casting a really bad actor because they will look good on a poster – what we might call the Grease 2 syndrome. (I’m reminded of when I questioned the casting of a not great but very symmetrically pleasing actor as a key lead in a new show and was told ‘don’t worry, he’ll carry it’. Reader, he didn’t.)
This miscategorisation – of politicians who look like one thing, but are in fact another – always leads through confusion to disaster. There are many recent examples. Boris Johnson could outflank opponents with his loveable eccentricity. But he governed as just another bungling centrist. Amazingly, Johnson still has a reputation based on what he looks like rather than what he actually is. This is a renowned, highly remunerated after-dinner speaker who can’t make it through one sentence.
Then there was Jeremy Corbyn – the twinkly grandpa who was in fact irascible, petulant, and totally uninterested in even talking to people on the other side. The main purpose of democratic politics is to coax people over to your way of thinking. Corbyn couldn’t bear even standing next to David Cameron. Tony Blair seems like a ‘pretty straight sort of guy’. When he speaks, to my own disgust, I still find myself half-convinced by his apparent reasonableness. But this is the man who single-handedly trashed so much of what actually worked about this country, and is the major cause of so many of our problems. The best example of the ‘what you see is not what you get’ phenomenon is, of course, the Green party. People vote for them because they think they’re nice, Tom and Barbara from The Good Life-types. In fact they are quite deranged people who trail unemptied bins and extreme gender antics in their wake.
Back to Mordaunt. Her worst quality is that she will follow whatever is fashionable or socially expedient, not her own judgement. This is someone who parroted ‘trans women are women’ on numerous, very public, occasions. While I’m all for truth and reconciliation and golden bridges for people hoodwinked by the extremes of genderism, that is a very big deal. It displays an unwillingness to acknowledge basic reality when a few well-connected people might get upset. That is a big character flaw in a politician, the worst they can have.
Mordaunt may appeal to the kind of Tory who goes wobbly at the knees at the sight of a gloriously statuesque woman hefting a sword. They imagine she is the Lady of the Lake emerging, wielding Excalibur to lead us to Avalon. But there is nothing there.
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