Penny Mordant's bid for leadership is surely over

[ChristinaXYZ]

Her obfuscation over her views on the trans issue in a long and rather disingenuous twitter thread earlier has brought a "senior Whitehall official," incensed by the perceived duplicity, out to say this:

"A senior Whitehall official gets in touch about Mordaunt and the maternity bill. “She fought AGAINST the change to ‘women’. The way she’s trying to rewrite history to suit her is despicable. While she’s supposedly campaigning on character and values. can’t believe the hypocrisy”

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We all could see when it was happening it was only the steadfastness of the Lords that got the words woman and mother back in to the legislation.

On top of the that she used footage of the late Jo Cox rather cynically earlier too in a bout of self-promotion.

She has no judgement at all and her relationship with the truth seems rather strained. As the first comment in the thread says this is surely her Andrea Leadsom moment.

Penny Mordaunt should step-down before she does any more damage.

Thanks for pointing that out, I’d never have guessed 🙄

Thing is that the membership can see straight through it. If the parliamentary party deprives it of its preferred candidate, it will punish it. They ignore the membership or treat it with contempt at their peril.

Odds on favourite having done nothing to justify that, maybe there is substance behind Mordaunt, we havn’t seen any yet, so not impressed.

I think that can depend, I don't know that I would generalize. I don't think it's the case the members necessarily feel that MPs have some sort of moral obligation to do what the members want. If anything MPs have an obligation to the electorate.

Maria Miller appearing on Sky News this morning: trans issues are simultaneously so important that they need to be elevated above politics, because they are about how people live their lives, and so unimportant that they are not an issue in the campaign. Oh, and trans women are women, that’s Mordant’s opinion and that’s the law.

So Maria Miller doesn’t want Penny to win then? I thought they were friends?

I think they’ve determined that not enough people care, and she can revert to her previous (insane) position.

So we’ve swapped one lying bastard for another if she wins. Awesome. When did politics get like this, where a party can’t field one decent candidate out of the whole party. It’s the same as when it was Trump v Clinton. Was that seriously the best America could do?

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I did see on twitter yesterday that the average Tory member is 57, white & 70% of them are men. They aren’t activists - they don’t go out door knocking or campaigning

apparently they are apoplectic about the state of the economy so not keen on Rishi & like penny because she’s not too associated with Johnson.

You mean sex, not gender.

Doesn’t the blatant lying over it (and other things) matter to Conservatives?

The Conservatives have been demonstrating for the last three years that lies, corruption and worse don't matter to them. They probably feel that having another liar in post will be just like the good old days with Boris.

Mordant has the worst qualities of Boris (no attention to detail) and the worst of Keir (jumps on any woke bandwagon).

Labour surely want her as PM because it then shifts all of politics to the left and we have no choice between either woke blue or woke red.

I’m actually more bothered by the reports of incompetence than the gendersuckerdom. And don’t get me wrong, I’m VERY bothered by the gendersuckerdom.

another incompetent liar who doesn’t know what the fuck they want or why they’re there. And not even as good as the last one at being an incompetent liar, lacking BJ’s flamboyance.

More of the same, except worse, and on top of that they’d be destroying one of the only clear political advantages the Tories have over their opponents (absolutely no one likes gendersuckers.) The Tories would be mad to pick her, so I presume they will.

I’m actually more bothered by the reports of incompetence

I would be if one or more of her opponents wasn’t so obviously orchestrating a smear campaign against her. It was only when her obvious popularity with the membership was revealed that all these people alleging incompetence started coming out of the woodwork.

As soon as she was ejected from the race on Thursday Braverman stuck the knife in and, as if by magic, Frost and the Lord Moylan popped up the next day and said she was incompetent. Someone somewhere really doesn’t like her.

Someone somewhere really doesn’t like her.

It doesn’t seem to me like a smear campaign so much as: she’s the one to beat, being second front runner and a lesser known quantity than Sunak, so they’re all trying to beat her. I think it’s rather more likely that they’re trying to beat her with the truth than with a pre-agreed lie.

Yes, I kind of see that. To me there’s a nasty whiff of dirty tricks, though. It’s just too convenient that Frost and Moylan suddenly pop up almost simultaneously so swiftly after Braverman had a go. Frost definitely had that carefully crafted piece in the Telegraph sitting there waiting to damage her. He didn’t write that in five minutes.

It’s not really that surprising. She hasn’t held any big cabinet roles even though she’s a) pro Brexit and b) hot, so she must have some weaknesses that aren’t well known.

She hasn’t held any big cabinet roles

No, she was only Minister for Defence.

She's been (just off the top of my head) a Minister for Defence, Secretary of State for International Development, Secretary of State for Defence and simultaneously Minister for Women & Equalities, Paymaster General, and currently Minister for International Trade. She's a Member of the Privy Council, presumably, having been a Secretary of State, and styled as 'Right Honourable' in Commons debate.

She hasn't held one of the so-called 'great offices of state' but she's been extraordinarily well-promoted in her 12 year career in the Commons, considering her actual abilities.

Well promoted or promoted sideways to move her on perhaps as not doing the job particularly well. If you have a cv from a candidate with lots of short term jobs you always wonder why.

Not in politics. There’s no comparison to an ordinary job. Anyway being sacked from every job he ever had didn’t impede Johnson.

Yes her career trajectory looks like a bit of a bell curve - up and up, across, down and down. The 'up' was under Theresa May, the down under Boris Johnson.

"She's like Boris" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement at the moment.

Maybe even the Tories are sick of being lead by blatant liars. Even if they don't give a shit about trans "rights" aka trans demands over women's rights, she's shown she had form for being a liar. And not a very good one. One that wastes a lot of energy rather than one that provides a useful distraction.

I don’t think they care about lies - although I’m not entirely clear what she’s supposed to have lied about.