Who is Penny Mordaunt? The navy reservist who could yet sail into Downing Street

The ‘gallant lady’ with a sailor’s humour is hoping to replace Liz Truss but faces a tough ask in overcoming a wave of support for Rishi Sunak

After Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership collapsed under a hundred-weight of hubris in just six weeks, the Conservative Party again find themselves scrambling for a new leader.

Her defeated opponent in this summer’s leadership race, ex-chancellor Rishi Sunak, appears to be her likeliest successor after Boris Johnson aborted an unlikely comeback bid, although Portsmouth North MP Penny Mordaunt still has her supporters.

While Mr Sunak disappeared to the backbenches during the short-lived Truss tenure, no doubt gloating over how accurate his warnings about her “fairy tale” economic policies proved to be, Ms Mordaunt joined her Cabinet as leader of the House of Commons.

She was forced to understudy for Ms Truss in Parliament when Labour forced an urgent question on the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng from the Treasury after the catastrophe that was his “mini-Budget”, which caused chaos in the markets, necessitated a massive bailout from the Bank of England and his replacement with Jeremy Hunt.

While Ms Mordaunt ably held her own in a very difficult moment, what is it exactly that parliamentary Tories see in the Right Honourable Penelope Mary Mordaunt?

Such a question has to be posed because she is the first prospective future prime minister to have appeared in a swimsuit on national television, back in 2014, on the otherwise forgettable ITV celebrity diving show Splash!, which also featured the likes of Joey Essex, Linda Barker and Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards.

Sad to say, Ms Mordaunt’s backflip was a bit of a flop. Jo Brand, an unlikely judge, and Tom Daley sent her back to the changing rooms, but she made off with £10,000 in prize money, some of which she used to rebuild a lido in her constituency, the rest being distributed among military charities. (This is in sharp contrast to the time Nadine Dorries earned £20,288 from her turn on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, which she failed to declare in the register of members’ interests.)

Apart from being game for a game show, Ms Mordaunt has much else to commend her. She’s a Leaver and she comes from a military family, both attributes that well suit the performatively nationalistic Tory party of today. Indeed, this ocean-going leadership contender was named after HMS Penelope.

Her father served in the Royal Marines before going into teaching and Ms Mordaunt was brought up in Portsmouth (as a nine-year-old schoolgirl she soaked in all the city’s tense excitement during the Falklands conflict in 1982). She explained in her maiden speech some three decades later that HMS Penelope was “the first cruiser able to do a complete about-turn within her own length – a manoeuvre that I hope never to have to deploy here”.

Her mother died of cancer when Ms Mordaunt was one and she became a carer to her younger brother, but it didn’t affect her education at a comprehensive Roman Catholic state school. Despite a vaguely posh-sounding name, her family background isn’t especially prosperous and she worked as a magician’s assistant to fund her way through her A-levels. After university she went into PR, with spells working for the party’s youth wing, for William Hague and for George W Bush’s presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004 (as head of foreign press).

If Ms Mordaunt ever does make it into No 10, she will actually be only the second PM to have attended a comprehensive after Ms Truss became the first, following two old Etonians and a grammar school girl. She also obtained a degree in philosophy, from the University of Reading. Ms Mordaunt is a proud Royal Navy reservist, lately promoted to captain, which would mean she could be addressed in the Commons as the “right honourable and gallant lady”, which seems to suit her. During her brief spell as secretary of state for defence, she was, in effect, her own commander.

She certainly ticks the patriotic box, but was not the only ex-military type jostling for position in the recent leadership race – Tom Tugendhat served in the Territorial Army and Intelligence Corps.

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She’s keen on talking about how important practical planning is to ministerial success and how she wants to see a series of “national missions” to unite the nation. As a social liberal, she also seems less willing to stir up culture wars. Indeed, she got herself into some controversy last year by standing up for the human rights of trans people, saying that “trans men are men and trans women are women”. That took as much guts as her televised high-diving, and she’s not the type to duck a challenge, or to dither and delay, Johnson-style.

That she has a very different personality from that of Mr Johnson might also explain why he sacked her so abruptly as defence secretary when he became PM in 2019 – reportedly in a “brief conversation”. On the day of the confidence vote in June, it was noted that Ms Mordaunt had tweeted out a constituency engagement commemorating the D-Day landings and the value of selfless service, rather than the copy-and-paste toadying tweet chosen by most of her colleagues.

When she eventually put out a statement, it was more damaging to the PM than if she’d kept shtum, with its pointedly past tense: “I didn’t choose this prime minister, I didn’t support him in the leadership contest, but he has always had my loyalty, because I think that’s what you do when you have a democratic process – you select a leader, and then you owe that person your loyalty. That’s always been my approach, whatever differences I’ve had with people, and that remains.

“I’m one of his ministers and I have continued to support him. I hope that we can return swiftly to the real business at hand, which is getting growth back into the economy and continuing our support in the Ukraine. I think being here, at the D-Day memorial in Portsmouth today, is a reminder of what’s really important outside the Westminster bubble.”

She risked, if that’s the right word, being sacked by Mr Johnson a second time; but he’s so weak he couldn’t dump her, because it was a secret ballot, and all he would have succeeded in doing is anointing her as a brave challenger to his own malfeasance. Such a drama would also have invited unwelcome comparisons with his own cowardice: she’d have been the absolute darling of the rebels. Ms Mordaunt still hasn’t said how she voted. She hardly needs to.

We do know that she supported Hunt the last time the Tories had a leadership election, even introducing him at his launch event and this pair share a certain style of politics – a bit technocratic, managerial, and with a liking for sub-business-school jargon and theorising about “leadership”. She wrote a book titled Greater: Britain After the Storm, which is full of the kind of charts and schematics you’d expect to see peppering an MBA thesis and it reads like an amateurish version of the rather more mystifying stuff you encounter on Dominic Cummings’s blog.

Writing for Conservative Home in 2018, she declared on behalf of her party: “We are peddlers of hope” and she once said she thought Brexit Britain was “a challenger brand”, perhaps like Dacia cars, Monzo cards or Aldi, which gives you a taste of the Armando Iannucci-grade self-parody into which she can sometimes lapse.

It’s worth noting that one reviewer detected a more disturbing undertone in her writing: “Despite the book’s chipper optimism, a deeper cultural conflict simmers below the surface. When Ms Mordaunt extols the success of Donald Trump’s electoral appeal to middle America, hints at crafting a version of his agenda for the United Kingdom, and speaks of ‘empowering the silent majority’, she offers a glimpse of an ominous possible future for the Conservative Party.”

Ms Mordaunt has posited “The Twelve New Rules of Politics” for Conservative Home, which can’t be ignored, given she might be running Britain with these as her basis before too long. Out of a sense of clemency on my part, they’ve been edited:

1) As well as “to do” lists, leaders need “to be” lists. Be an optimist, inspire participation and courage.

2) Don’t let your resources frame your ambition. If you do, you’ll never deliver what is actually required. You have more resources than you think because, if you let them, others will help.

3) Articulate a mission to create an effort. Because people want to help, to come together and to get stuck in.

4) Having asked for help, let people help. The best, fastest and most cost-effective solutions to problems I have seen have not been generated or procured by government... We should align our planning cycles to the private and charitable sectors, enabling us to maximise the resource and impact on our shared objectives. Enabling legislation must keep pace with scientific discovery.

5) Be alert, to the past, the present and the future.

6) Plans – bad; planning – good. Get on with it. Don’t wait and write a strategy, just make a start. Learn as you go. And ensure you are prepared – the most underrated leadership quality.

7) The West needs to get its mojo back. The driving forces that have made the world a better place are the scientific advances, rule of law, property rights, representative government, a plurality of political thought, capitalism and the liberalisation of trade, consumer power and win-win international cooperation. But faith in those things is being rocked. We stand on the brink of huge breakthroughs in making the world healthier and wealthier. Without those things that have enabled us to make progress to date, we will fail to make progress in the future.

8) Listen and value people. Politicians are quick to criticise behaviours in other sectors which create echo chambers, but we are guilty of that too, via a focus on swing voters and our core support. With the communications tools we have today there is no excuse for not reaching out. (I happen to believe everyone is a Conservative, they just haven’t realised it yet!)

9) Public vs private dogma is dead.

10) New power must get out of its armchair. Activism is one thing, but we need active citizens as well as expert citizens. The Big Society had some successes, but they were the exception rather than the rule. We must inspire, harness and enable a greater contribution to the world from people than letters via 38 Degrees.

11) Seriously small government. The logical conclusion of all of the above is that Whitehall needs to shrink and decamp, become more collaborative and nimble.

12) And finally: Values are the margin of victory.

There you go: a manifesto of what our recent PM might dismiss as “piffle”.

But while Ms Mordaunt’s style is very different from that of Johnson and she is a far more sincere Brexiteer, her politics are not so very different – vague ideas that try to have things both ways, aka cakeism, and trying to transform society without spending any money. That speaks to a broader reality about politics in the 2020s, which is that a stagnant economy isn’t going to yield much funding for any kind of “levelling up”. In a way, the economic and fiscal restraints mean that any PM will have minimal freedom of movement.

As far as can be judged, Ms Mordaunt does back the green agenda and its associated targets: “Climate change is an existential threat… unless we tackle climate change, much of the government’s other work will be for nothing.”

Ms Mordaunt is keener on national unity and teamwork than Mr Johnson ever was, though it would not be a total shock to find that Ms Mordaunt and Mr Hunt concluded a non-aggression pact and a mutual agreement to serve one another as PM and chancellor, depending on who wins the inevitable leadership election – despite their different outlooks on Brexit. Some might think Mordaunt-Hunt a dream ticket; others might see it as the same dilemmas under nicer management.

Her eventual arrival in Downing Street post-Truss would be quite a comeback. Though she’s never said as much, it must have been hard for her to be fired as defence secretary in 2019 by the then-new PM. Ms Mordaunt had been the first female in the role and with her background it was a dream job – but she was removed, to the puzzlement of many, after just 85 days in post. She went to the back benches, but returned in February 2020 as a sort of all-purpose Brexit and civil contingencies minister, with the honorific title of “paymaster general”, under Michael Gove, before moving to be minister of state for trade policy, again below cabinet level, last year.

Given the hopelessness of getting a trade deal out of the Biden White House, she’s been busying herself getting a few deals done with individual states, but the macroeconomic effects will be modest when set against the hit to GDP from Brexit (say five per cent). As a committed Brexiteer, she once wrote an article in which she encouraged her readers to be inspired to draw on the Dunkirk spirit, though it’s fair to say without any sense of irony, given Dunkirk was a military disaster.

One of the oddities about Mordaunt’s varied ministerial career is that she’s benefited so much from other people getting the push. Theresa May gave her her first Cabinet job as international development secretary in 2017, when Priti Patel was dismissed for freelancing in Israel. Ms Mordaunt added the women and equalities brief to her remit when Amber Rudd had to resign in 2019 and is one of the few Tories to have taken the issues seriously – she gave the first Commons speech to be made in sign language in 2018 (and got a huge round of applause for it).

Gavin Williamson’s first fall from grace saw Ms Mordaunt promoted to defence secretary (where she’d been a popular junior minister some years before). It was around that time that the speculation about her future really got going (until it was promptly crushed by Mr Johnson). At that time, for example, The Economist presciently mused: “Ms Mordaunt’s rise... is reordering the race to succeed the prime minister [May], providing Brexiteers with a potential new champion who is less dodgy than Boris Johnson and more likeable than Dominic Raab.”

Like Mr Johnson, there has never been any self-doubt about Captain Mordaunt, which is presumably why she is described in Alan Duncan’s diaries as “self-inflated”, as well as “angst-ridden” and a “nutter”.

No-nonsense, serious and organised as she is, she also has a sailor’s bawdy sense of humour, which might not be to everyone’s taste. Early in her time as a very junior minister, for example, she apparently took on a bet to utter a rude word as many times as possible in a single speech in Parliament. The chosen word was “cock” and the forum was a debate on the welfare of poultry on British farms. Indeed, Ms Mordaunt added a smutty bonus with a few egg-based jokes about getting laid, on top of the six “cocks” she treated herself to during her performance.

Kate Hoey thought Ms Mordaunt had demeaned Parliament. No matter. With her characteristic fearlessness, Ms Mordaunt did the same during her witty speech on the loyal address in 2014, an honour given to a chosen up-and-coming newish MP.

She cheerfully offered this anecdote to a packed house: “Training must be tailored to enable us to be our best. I have benefited from some excellent training by the Royal Navy, but on one occasion I felt that it was not as bespoke as it might have been. Fascinating though it was, I felt that the lecture and practical demonstration on how to care for the penis and testicles in the field failed to appreciate that some of us attending had been issued with the incorrect kit.” In one sense, Ms Mordaunt has talked more bollocks than anyone else in parliamentary history.

She’s been praised for her generally robust and effective performances at the despatch box – and credited with demolishing Angela Rayner and Ian Blackford – and she is as good a speaker as Mr Johnson, though clearly less theatrical and with fewer references to the classics. She might or might not be able to do a better job than either Mr Johnson or Ms Truss of holding on to Remain-inclined middle-class seats in the south of England as well as Leave-leaning seats in the former red wall, Mr Johnson having managed it by the sheer force of his personality.

But then again, her party seems to be growing tired of Big Dog’s shtick and to be looking around for something new, or rather for someone new. The sort of person who’ll make a bit of a splash.