'Did Mumsnet Just Hand Penny Mordaunt Her Arse?'
(extract)
“Don’t you worry about getting back to us, Penny dearest. Mumsnet only has ‘14 million unique users’ a month ... Just you sit tight and eventually get one of your minions to post some anodyne rhetoric about valuing diversity and it’ll all be fine.”
— Mumsnet poster, webchat with Penny Mordaunt 14/3/19 13.55pm
It takes a certain set of tools to turn a golden opportunity to engage with hundreds of thousands of women on International Women’s Day into an unmitigated PR disaster, and Penny Mordaunt MP has somehow managed to pull it off. I’ve met Penny Mordaunt a few times in Portsmouth over the years while I was on Council-related business, and she has always seemed perfectly likeable and pleasant. But future Prime Minister material? Not unless courting disaster is now seen as prerequisite rather than unfortunate happenstance." (continues)
concludes:
"The Mumsnetters who had asked their questions in such detail, and with such courtesy - posters have to abide by Mumsnet’s fairly stringent ‘Talk Guidlines’ - were left disappointed and, frankly, pissed off, especially regarding the unanswered points about children’s safeguarding. But they weren’t leaving the webchat meekly. ‘Disappointed but not surprised’ wrote one poster. ‘Completely disingenuous’ wrote another. Of her apparent ignorance around the issues raised concerning children’s safeguarding, a poster wrote, more in sadness than anger, ‘This is unforgiveable. You were given all the information. All of it. Spoonfed it. You haven’t bloody well read it.’ And one of the most damning comments so far: ‘Either Penny, or Penny’s SPADs are not up to par on the reports coming out of the Tavistock’. (Click here if you want to read the Mail’s report about the potentially brewing scandal, or here for a BBC snippet. It’s worth digging deeper if you’re interested.)
And finally, can the Minister for Women even define what is a woman? On this showing, the answer would seem to be No. The actual Minister for Woman apparently doesn’t ‘get it’, doesn’t want to ‘get it’, and seemingly can’t be bothered to ‘get it’. That’s a lot of women’s votes that have just been lost, whichever way you look at it. Post-modern, philosophical ideologies of feelings, and misunderstandings of the difference between sex and gender, should never, ever compromise the safeguarding of children. People who raise red flags about safeguarding deserve to be taken seriously and to have their voices heard. If we’ve we’ve learned nothing else during the past decade, surely to God we’ve learned that."
eleanorscottarchaeology.com/els-blog/2019/3/14/the-day-that-mumsnet-took-down-penny-mordaunt-mp
thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_live_events/3523984-International-Women-s-Day-Q-A-with-Penny-Mordaunt-MP-Secretary-of-State-for-International-Development-NOW-CLOSED-TO-NEW-QUESTIONS