Part-time Penny is so obviously unfit to be PM, it beggars belief 92 MPs voted for her. If Mr Sunak advances her cause in any way today, he’ll never be forgiven

THE Tory Party is rightly celebrated as the most successful political institution known to man, which, over the centuries, has gone on winning election after election while rival parties flounder or even disappear.

And yet this superbly successful political machine may be about to make a mistake of cosmic proportions which would plunge the country into chaos, and disgrace the Tories for a generation.

That could be the outcome if Conservative MPs are foolish enough to make Penny Mordaunt their second choice in this afternoon’s final round of the leadership contest.

Ms Mordaunt would then go through — along with Rishi Sunak, certain to be in first place today — to a final poll in which some 160,000 Conservative Party members take part. She could become Prime Minister.

Indeed, according to a YouGov poll published yesterday, Penny Mordaunt would comfortably beat Rishi Sunak in a run-off decided by the Tory faithful, though by slightly smaller margin than in a similar poll last week.

Given the recent astonishing revelations about Ms Mordaunt, it is barely credible that 92 MPs, most of whom are in possession of their faculties, voted for her yesterday. That was an increase of ten over her vote on Monday.

Here is a woman who has failed to attract the support of a single Cabinet member, and whose views on the economy and the world in general remain a mystery to the most assiduous student of her utterings.

Penny Mordaunt has succeeded in upsetting numerous people with whom she has worked.

Former Brexit Minister Lord Frost says he asked for her to be replaced as his junior minister during talks with the EU last year. She wasn’t tough in negotiations, and had a habit of disappearing.

Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan suggests that Ms Mordaunt, who works in her department, shirked her ministerial duties in order to plot her leadership campaign, and left colleagues to ‘pick up the pieces’.

Lord Moylan, a former deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, claims that when Ms Mordaunt was hired as director of communications in June 2001, she turned out to be ‘incompetent’, and showed ‘no leadership or management grip at all’.

Meanwhile, a source at the Department for International Trade asserts that the would-be Prime Minister ‘ has often been missing at the crucial moments’, and is known as ‘part-time Penny’.

The source adds that, instead of attending a recent ceremony in Indiana to celebrate a U.S. trade deal, Ms Mordaunt chose to promote a book she had co-authored, which, by the way, is brimming with woke sentiments you wouldn’t expect to find even in a prospective leader of the Labour Party.

It is perfectly true that most of us have enemies who might be eager to rubbish us in public, and that anyone standing for the Tory leadership is bound to be on the receiving end of barbs, some of which may be unjustified.

But the charges against Ms Mordaunt emanate from so many different quarters and share so many of the same disturbing criticisms — she isn’t a hard worker and is somewhat incompetent — that no reasonable person could discount them.

Moreover, it is a fact, not an opinion, that last year, while a minister, she met the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, an organisation subject to a government boycott since 2009, when Labour was in power.

And the most cursory examination of her remarks exposes startling inconsistencies (to put it kindly) about trans rights. She is either forgetful or not entirely straightforward.

For example, a leaked document suggests that as a minister she backed moves to allow gender self-identification. But in a TV debate last Friday she maintained she had ‘ never been

in favour’ of letting people choose their own gender without medical involvement.

Penny Mordaunt and her supporters say she is the victim of smears. People will make up their own minds, but on the evidence, and holding absolutely no animus against her, I don’t believe this is the case.

Surely it’s obvious that she should not be Prime Minister. And yet 92 MPs voted for her yesterday afternoon, and it is possible that today we will learn that more have rallied to her cause — and she will be one step away from running the country.

Or is something strange going on? Some have noted that although Penny Mordaunt put on 10 votes yesterday over her previous performance, and Liz Truss 15, Rishi Sunak gained only three.

This is odd, since Tom Tugendhat dropped out of the race on Monday having got 31 votes, a large number of which might have been expected to transfer to Mr Sunak, to whom he is more closely aligned politically than he is to any other candidate.

Some MPs suspect that Mr Sunak may have ‘lent’ some votes to Penny Mordaunt in order to thwart Liz Truss, who is regarded by his team as the more formidable rival.

We should consider some background facts. Jeremy Hunt, an early reject in the leadership contest last week, described Mr Sunak as ‘one of the most decent people’ in British politics. Maybe that doesn’t say too much for British politics.

We know Rishi pulled the plug on Boris two weeks ago. We know he has run a slick and wellprepared campaign. We also know that the domain ‘readyforrishi. com’, which re- directs to ‘ready4rishi.com’, was registered in December 2021.

Mr Sunak is reportedly close to Boris Johnson’s twisted arch enemy, Dominic Cummings, who is in turn friendly with a former owner of a company for ‘swingers’, Dougie Smith. The unwholesome Dougie is married to a former aide of Mr Johnson’s by the name of Munira Mirza, also pals with Sunak.

Ms Mirza resigned as head of No 10’s Policy Unit in February. Around the same time, Mr Smith,

Mordaunt seems to face similar criticisms from many sources

Might Gove conspire in a plot to defeat Liz Truss?

who has also worked in No 10, is said to have rung Boris to tell him the game was up. Mr Sunak denies the involvement of all three characters in his campaign.

I realise politics is a dirty game, and I mention all this not because I think Mr Sunak is a bad man but because his image as a goodygoody is belied by the friends he keeps, as well as by his role in getting rid of Mr Johnson.

Also signed up to Team Sunak is Sir Gavin Williamson — the worst Cabinet Minister in recent history, which is saying something, but an acknowledged master of the dark arts.

Another Sunak ally is the sinuous and clever Michael Gove, who oddly backed Kemi Badenoch, the outstanding Right-wing candidate knocked out yesterday. Might Gove conspire in a plot to transfer enough votes to Penny Mordaunt to defeat Liz Truss today?

Rishi Sunak almost certainly believes he could more easily see off Ms Mordaunt than Ms Truss in a beauty contest in front of the Tory rank- and- file. If so, he might be correct, since the wheels could easily come off a Penny Mordaunt campaign.

None of these machinations can be proven, and they won’t appear in any official biography. I make no specific allegations. I simply say it would be a despicable act for Mr Sunak to advance Penny Mordaunt’s cause in any way.

Let this be a fair fight between the two strongest candidates — Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. That is what is best for the Tory Party and for the country. Mr Sunak would never be forgiven if he helped Penny Mordaunt into No 10.