She failed us in our hour of need
PENNY MORDAUNT, the sometime Royal Navy reservist who somehow finds herself as a frontrunner in the race to be Conservative leader, has cloaked herself in the trappings of military culture. She has released a three-minute campaign video that contains 13 separate references to the Armed Forces, including one of the US Marine Corps, oddly.
Her shtick depends upon her military experience, although what this actually amounts to is unclear. She would like us to infer she has integrity under pressure, that she is someone we can all trust.
Well, I for one don’t trust her because when I needed help, she failed spectacularly. I sought her assistance in 2016, during her brief tenure as Armed Forces Minister. Two of my soldiers and I were under criminal investigation for a war crimes allegation dating back to my time serving in Iraq. I faced relentless bogus claims that I had murdered an
Iraqi teenager called Saeed Shabram, who drowned in a Basra dock in 2003.
Over 17 years, I would endure eight separate investigations.
Eventually, a court recognised that I had, in fact, spent 40 minutes in polluted water trying to save the young man’s life and that as far back as 2003, witnesses had conspired to have me framed for his death. Along with two of my soldiers,
I was fully exonerated in 2020, by the
UK’s Iraq Fatalities Investigations. But it was no thanks to Mordaunt.
She had arrived at the Ministry of Defence when the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) was performing a £60million witchhunt against more than 3,000 British veterans for imaginary war crimes. In my battle to clear my name, I wrote to Mordaunt twice. I told her about IHAT’s conduct towards me but rather than investigate my claims, her response was to back the allegations team which, she claimed, was independent of the MoD.
In 2016, the Daily Mail exposed how the MoD and IHAT were in fact paying an agent of human rights lawyer Phil Shiner to take statements from witnesses in Iraq and give video evidence to the IHAT team.
Mordaunt was then asked by Conservative
MP Bob Stewart ‘to assure the House that no investigator used by [Phil Shiner] is paid for by the MoD for any service’.
Mordaunt replied: ‘We have given clear ministerial direction those agents are not to be paid with public money, and we have received assurances that that is the case.’
When she said this, Shiner’s agent had been paid more than £110,000 from taxpayers’ money. I believe she misled Parliament.
Shiner, who had taken more than 1,000 cases to IHAT, has since been struck off. He is now charged with fraud, which he denies.
IHAT would later be disbanded and disgraced.
Penny Mordaunt was never up to the task as Minister for the Armed Forces. Her ministerial job was to stand up for British troops but she failed us. If she is appointed Prime Minister, she will do it again.