Yesterday afternoon, as Conservative MPs were busy voting in the first round of their party’s leadership contest, the British pollster YouGov released a poll which, no doubt, will have influenced many of them. It showed that when Conservative Members were given a choice, that choice would be overwhelming: Penny Mordaunt is the runaway favourite against, well, just about anyone:
BREAKING YouGov Conservative members poll which will electrify the leadership election
Penny Mordaunt beats EVERY candidate in a run off by at least 18 points
Sunak loses to everyone except Zahawi/Braverman/Hunt
Truss beats Sunak by 24 https://t.co/XU1eV4mg7S pic.twitter.com/O1OpWKCfZN
— Henry Zeffman (@hzeffman) July 13, 2022
The result is stunning on a couple of levels, and unsurprising on a couple more.
Stunning because Penny Mordaunt is presently the International Trade Minister – not even a member of the cabinet. Unsurprising because, well, since November of 1990 the Conservative and Unionist party has been searching its ranks for the reincarnation of Mrs. Thatcher.
In Penny Mordaunt, they probably have not found it.
Oh, she fits the bill on a number of levels: She is of an age with the Iron Lady when the Tories first chose her in the mid 1970s. She is a patriot, and a soldier, and someone who – this will thrill Tory activists – had her political awakening while watching Maggie’s task force set sail for the South Atlantic to administer a handbagging to the Argentinians. She has that same reserved authorativeness in her speaking that Thatcher pioneered, and the Tories saw in Theresa May.
But it was a mirage in the case of May, and it may be a mirage in the case of Mordaunt. She has been ferociously criticized in recent days for being, in the modern parlance, too woke. “Trans men are men, and trans women are women”, she said, though she is now reversing course on that quite rapidly:
I hope in, in the next few days we’ll able to discuss how we get our economy growing again and enable our citizens to live well. Right now, I’d like to address another question that I’ve been asked: pic.twitter.com/OImF6kUVzx
— Penny Mordaunt (@PennyMordaunt) July 9, 2022
The sneaking suspicion that this writer has is that Mordaunt, ultimately, may have one of the same core problems as her predecessor, if she’s elected. Boris Johnson, famously, won election by flipping a lot of working class Labour seats by saying things that it is not politically correct to say. He was not a big fan of immigration, or the EU, or globalization, or what we might call “wokeism” in the round. The problem, of course, is that while Boris Johnson is a very gifted communicator of those ideas, there’s no real evidence he ever truly believed them. Indeed, his centrepiece political project, Brexit and Ukraine aside, was “net zero by 2050”. Campaigned as a populist, governed, at least a little, like a Green.
It’s worth remembering – especially to an Irish audience – why the Tories loved Thatcher. Mainly it’s because she remains the only leader who didn’t just say these things, but believed them, too. When she said, for example that “they’re a weak lot, in Europe. Weak, Weak, Weak”, she really meant it. And she did not mind if EU leaders did not like her. Mr. Johnson, by contrast, always gave off the impression that it sort of wounded him to have to upset Mr. Macron and Mrs. Merkel, and that he’d much rather be thought of well by the very club that he was leaving.
But conservatism has long had this problem: Leaders who simultaneously oppose the status quo, and, at the same time, desperately wish to be liked and accepted by those who prop it up.
It is not fair to say, yet, that Ms Mordaunt is such a person. But her flip flop on transgender issues is not encouraging, though it may be in the right direction. If the Tories are going to entrench themselves as the party of the discontented working classes who voted for Brexit, it might be useful to have a leader who really represents those people. I am not sure Ms Mordaunt does, even though she seems like a fine person, in the round.