Why rising star is making a splash
UNTIL this week, Penny Mordaunt may have been best known for her 2014 stint on diver Tom Daley’s reality TV show Splash! It also featured the likes of singer Paul Young and model Danielle Lloyd.
Mordaunt tried to impress the judges, despite modestly admitting she had the “elegance and drive of a paving slab”.
Over the past few days she has dived headlong into an even bigger challenge and the navy reservist now looks like she’s in with a chance of making it to No 10. She has consistently come second to Rishi Sunak and is ahead in the polls of Tory members.
But how did she pull off such a dramatic ascent?
Mordaunt’s ministerial career has been steady but not stellar, although she had a brief stint as Britain’s first woman defence secretary until she was sacked by Boris Johnson.
Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister, said that he had “grave reservations” about her abilities when she was his deputy, while officials at the Trade
Department claimed she “dialled it in” rather than getting stuck in to her role. Others, though, describe her as a capable minister who got on with the job and managed to combine compassion with military steeliness. Mordaunt has won the backing of veteran Tory MP Andrea Leadsom and a host of other pro-Brexit, socially liberal Tories. But one politician says: “She’s a loner. She doesn’t have many friends here. So none of us really know her or what she stands for.” The key to her current rise seems to be keeping her distance from Johnson, which helps her look like she is the “change candidate”. With her military connections, PR polish and no-nonsense demeanour, she is likely to go down well in the Tories’ southern heartlands and, her team hopes, in the Red Wall. Labour insiders admit that Mordaunt would be more of a threat to their chances at the next election than any of her competitors for the Tory crown. So if the party is looking for someone to make a splash, it could well be Mordaunt.