What the selfish Tory women conspiring to take Rishi’s place as party leader can learn from Mrs T...

WHEN the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, agreed to see Penny Mordaunt for a meeting in the run-up to this week’s Budget, he did so because the Leader of the House of Commons had said she wanted to discuss constituency matters.

Imagine his consternation when the Portsmouth MP did not just run a photo of their meeting on her Twitter/X page, but ended her text underneath with the words: ‘Our first duty is to protect our nation and its interests.’

This, as she had doubtless hoped, led to a front page newspaper headline, under the picture from her social media account, ‘Our first duty is to protect Britain, Mordaunt tells Hunt, amid defence spending row’.

Yes, Ms Mordaunt is preparing to run (again) for the leadership of the Conservative Party, and if it means boosting her own cause at the expense of any appearance of Cabinet unity, so be it.

It rather chimes with a recent report by the most assiduous chronicler of the Conservatives’ wars of succession, Tim Shipman, that of all those currently preparing the ground for a challenge, Mordaunt is ‘the most brazen … [her] manoeuvring behind the scenes is quite something’.

Or in the case of last week’s stunt, not behind the scenes, but centre stage.

Blunt

Mordaunt did the same thing to Boris Johnson, when his chaotic leadership was being exposed in 2022. Under the cover of the anniversary of the D-Day landings in June, she wrote an article praising the leadership qualities of the Allies’ military chief (and later U.S. President), General Dwight Eisenhower, observing: ‘Confidence without competence is a dangerous combination.’

That a senior minister, which she was at the time, would mount such an obvious attack on the Prime Minister’s style of leadership might have struck some as refreshingly blunt. But those of an older political school would see it as unconscionable self-promotion — at the expense of the collegiality and loyalty without which no party in government can prosper or even survive.

Those qualities may now be outdated. As one exasperated and entirely loyal Cabinet minister put it to me: ‘In an earlier generation, the Conservative party in government was run as if it were the Brigade of Guards, while Labour’s ethos was that of the National Union of Mineworkers.

‘Both in the military and down the mines, there was an intensely collective spirit — which was actually essential in such environments. But nowadays, it’s the hyper-individualistic politics of personal social media accounts.’

No politician exemplifies that change more than Liz Truss. Before she became PM, she was noted for her obsession with promoting her own image with (sometimes bizarre) ‘selfies’, pushed out on what we then called Twitter.

Her peculiar form of personal brand promotion has not been in any way diminished by her uniquely catastrophic period as Prime Minister.

Last week, she (once again) blamed the collapse of her administration on some sort of plot by ‘Left-wing’ economists in the civil service: whereas her true nemesis was the international credit markets’ devastating verdict on her decision to cut taxes while simultaneously saying she would ‘absolutely not’ reduce public spending and offering untold billions in heating bill subsidies.

And Truss seems blissfully unaware of how deeply unpopular she is even with traditional Conservative voters. It would be funny, if it were not pathetic, that she has tried to relaunch herself under a new banner of ‘PopCon’ — that is, Popular Conservatism.

All she achieves with this self-promotion is to make the Labour Party still happier, as they can reprise the line they used when Truss was PM: that the Conservatives ‘crashed the economy’.

Startling

It is as if Rishi Sunak, whose prescient warnings about Truss’s policies were ignored during their leadership contest, has a (political) woman problem.

For there is also Suella Braverman — another whose belief that she really should be party leader is startling to behold. You might recall how, live on Robert Peston’s TV show, the then Attorney General announced (to the presenter’s amazement) her candidacy to replace the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, even though he had not yet offered to resign.

It is interesting to compare her own recent behaviour with that of Robert Jenrick. Both of them left Sunak’s Cabinet because they had argued that the PM’s policies were insufficiently robust.

Admittedly Jenrick resigned, whereas Braverman was asked to leave. But still, the contrast between Jenrick’s collegiality and Braverman’s incendiary tone, in their respective letters to the PM, is astounding.

Jenrick wrote: ‘Against strong headwinds you have stabilised the country, shown leadership on the world stage, and done much to improve the lives of millions of citizens across the UK, for which you deserve much greater recognition.’

Braverman wrote of Sunak’s ‘betrayal of your promise to the nation . You sought to put off tough decisions in order to minimise political risk to yourself.’

I can see that many voters might view Braverman’s language as admirably direct, and Jenrick’s as party political piety. But I wonder, admittedly on the basis of a very small sample size, whether this also reflects a more basic difference between the sexes.

There is an analogy with domestic life. For men, in my experience, are intensely awkward about conducting rows in public; women tend to mind less.

In terms of leadership, women — in this country — have proved themselves beyond all question. Our best monarchs have been women (and the worst, men); and our greatest post-war PM was Margaret Thatcher.

Nostalgic

But this fact has also led to a peculiar weakness within the modern Conservative Party: many of its members seem so nostalgic for the Maggie factor that they see her sprit reincarnated in any would-be successor of the same sex.

They believed it of Theresa May; they believed it of Liz Truss. And in both cases they were bitterly disappointed.

It’s often said that it’s more difficult for a woman to get to the top, which means that those who do are tougher than the men. In general, this is true — and women put up with misogynistic abuse in politics that no man has to endure.

But David Cameron’s ‘A list’ MP selection policies, favouring women, meant that Liz Truss was given special treatment and was also fast-tracked into the Cabinet — which might be one reason she became convinced of her political capabilities, against all evidence.

And Margaret Thatcher herself had no such iron- clad self- confidence, despite appearances. I remember sitting next to her at an event to promote her memoirs. The audience was of her fans, but she still seemed nervous as she gathered her notes: I noticed that her hands were shaking slightly.

When she did mount her own challenge to the leadership of Ted Heath, after he had lost two general elections in the same year (1974), it was not preceded by a personal campaign to undermine him or to promote herself.

Indeed, she had felt that Sir Keith Joseph should be the challenger: it was only when he astonished her by declaring he wouldn’t, that Thatcher said: ‘If you are not going to stand, then I will.’

And compared to Margaret Thatcher, who is Penny Mordaunt?