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LONDON – The surprise favorite to replace Boris Johnson as British Prime Minister is named after a legendary World War II battleship: HMS Penelope, shot down by a German submarine after numerous brushing.
But those who have worked with Penny Mordaunt at Whitehall instead compare her to a eponymous figurine she used to carry from department to department for much of her relatively unobtrusive ministerial career.
Mordaunt was known for showing in her ministerial offices a large model of the 1960s puppet Lady Penelope, a character in the cult British children’s television series Thunderbirds. Lady Penelope was a London-based secret agent, famous for her elegant dresses and her pink Rolls Royce, equipped with machine guns and bulletproof glass.
The doll was a gift from the British Marines when Mordaunt became Minister of the Armed Forces in 2015, in part as a mark of respect for his own military background.
“She has a little bit of Lady Penelope on her,” a current classmate said. “She’s glamorous, but she means business and she might have guns hidden in the car.”
Undoubtedly, Mordaunt has shown his best-known conservative rivals that it is a business in recent days.
Earlier this week she was best known for putting on a swimsuit in 2014 and for having a bad high dive as part of the reality TV show ‘Splash!’, And for a notorious two-way speech that he spoke in parliament after losing a bet with his Navy friends. She is also the only deputy on duty who is known to have worked as an assistant to a magician, albeit in the distant past.
But Mordaunt has become a household name overnight after his supportive colleagues and conservative admirer members put rocket propellers under his outside bid to replace Johnson on Downing Street.
He currently ranks second after former Chancellor Rishi Sunak after two rounds of voting among Conservative MPs, who are tasked with reducing the candidates to the last two before the party members vote. And he would comfortably win all his likely opponents in this final face-to-face vote, a series of polls have suggested.
“It could turn out that this was a motivation,” the former minister said. “If there’s an attitude in her makeup that ‘you don’t give a shit about me, so I’ll show you what I’m made of,’ I wouldn’t be surprised.”
A former minister who worked with Mordaunt argued that Johnson could have inadvertently put her on the path to succeed him when he abruptly fired her as secretary of defense in a “vindictive” act after taking office in 2019. Former aides of Johnson insist it was simply not well valued. enough for the new regime to maintain a high-level role, although most of Westminster assumes the former prime minister left it to support his leading rival, Jeremy Hunt.
He added: “There is a big boost and determination in it, and people are missing it because of their risk.”
The political battlefield
It is true that Mordaunt has spent a lifetime in politics fighting for causes close to his heart, and winning.
His appearance on reality television raised enough money to save his local lido from closure in the south coast town of Portsmouth; pulled the strings to help save Portsmouth Football Club from bankruptcy; and publicly harangued Whitehall officials to cancel a local energy project, which was in fact canceled.
“I was leaving letters and requests at the front of the department while the project was in the planning stage,” an official from the business, energy and industrial strategy department said. “I’m not sure how she came out as a minister.”
Mordaunt also fought as part of the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit, which he won in 2016 with Johnson at the helm.
Then it was Mordaunt, not Johnson, who stood up in the cabinet and fought harder to block a deal that would have left the UK within the EU customs union, according to his supporter and former Brexit negotiator David Davis.
“At the Checkers meeting, she was the most effective and clinical in getting a result,” Davis said, recalling the 2018 summit at the prime minister’s rural residence where Theresa May tried and failed. sell your deal to your top team.
When he and Johnson later resigned from the Checkers plan, Davis states that he thought Mordaunt was so effective that he should remain in office. “I told him,‘ Don’t resign, ’” he said. “We need people like you to fight the inside corner.”
‘Sleeping Penny’
But Mordaunt has yet to be tested, or even properly examined, at the highest level, and it is clear that not all past or present colleagues value her highly.
Some in the Department of International Trade, where she now serves as junior minister, say they will shirk their responsibilities, focusing only on a limited number of issues that matter to them and hiding in their parliamentary offices to chart their path to to leadership.
One official was anxious to point out that new releases detailing ministerial trips abroad show that Mordaunt did not make a single trip abroad in the first quarter of 2022, despite its trade-focused report. He has earned the nickname “Sleeping Penny” among the less than generous members of his team.
Surprisingly, her boss, International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan, is supporting a rival, Tom Tugendhat, for conservative leadership, while another Commerce Minister, Ranil Jayawardena, is supporting Liz Truss. It seems that none of his closest colleagues believe he is up to the job of prime minister.
It seems that none of his closest colleagues believe that he is up to the job of Prime Minister | Jack Taylor / Getty Images
A former head of another department, David Frost, who was a close adviser to Johnson and has a huge influence in conservative circles, attacked Mordaunt this week on live television. She complained that she was not “fully responsible or always visible” within her department; he seldom went through the detail of his brief; and even questioned his commitment to the cause of Brexit.
Others disagree that Mordaunt is a shirker. A Whitehall official working next to him in the cabinet office said not being visible did not mean he was not doing his job well.
“He would get all the work in his ministerial box and do what he needed,” the person said. “But she was demoted from a cabinet minister to random minor roles. No wonder she wasn’t motivated to make a lot of jokes and defend Downing Street in the media.”
A closed book
Mordaunt’s rocky leadership pitch contrasted sharply with the ingenious campaigns launched by clearly prepared rivals like Sunak.
His release video was a bit tenuous and needed some editing of controversial images following the complaints immediately after its release. He had no press spokesman in place several days after Johnson’s resignation, and is still in the process of setting up a proper campaign team.
His campaign is now chaired by another former Vote Leave ally, Andrea Leadsom, who ran as leader in 2016 and is now being touted by some as Mordaunt’s election as chancellor.
One thing Mordaunt lacks is a plan for the challenges facing Britain after Brexit. He co-wrote a book with Chris Lewis (a consultant called “The Great Enchilada”) called “Greater: Britain After the Storm.” The couple arrived by helicopter to promote the book at a summer literature festival.
His work was supported by an astonishing cast of characters, including former Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair, singer Elton John, screenwriter Richard Curtis and businessman Richard Branson.
But if Mordaunt becomes prime minister, he will need more than a book to introduce himself to the public. This week’s polls showed that only 20 per cent of Britons knew who he was, just over 12 per cent of people who claimed to know about a fake MP the poll had invented as a test case.
For Conservative MPs pondering whether to put it to the final vote of two, the question is less about who it is than what it stands for.
“No one knows Penny well,” said a senior MP still thinking who to support. “No one knows what she is. It’s a closed book.”