Penny Mordaunt - Another Tory Liar

She had the momentum, would be a new face in Downing Street, a clean break from the tainted and irretrievably discredited figure of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Penny Mordaunt had come a solid second in the latest round of voting for the Tory leadership. Sadly, we were soon reminded, the fresh new face was not so unlike the stale old one.

Penny Mordaunt. God help us

That is because Ms Mordaunt shares one key attribute with Bozo: the ability to talk well, but lie badly. A further common trait appears to be an inability to retract and apologise when presented with the reality of being bang to rights. One example of the genre was her misleading the Fire Brigades’ Union.

As FBU News noted back in 2015, Matt Wrack had been less than totally impressed by her. “She gave firefighters a clear guarantee several times in Parliament last December. Many firefighters believed her, and so did MPs. It now seems she misled both the House of Commons and ourselves … Firefighters have been utterly cheated. Their pensions have been stolen on the basis of false information given to the House of Commons”.

It got no better as Ms Mordaunt joined the Leave side in the run-up to the 2016 EU Referendum, appearing on The Andy Marr Show™ and pitching the flat-out lie that not only was Turkey about to join the EU, but that the UK, then a member state, would be unable to veto the accession. She then added another lie to that by claiming that Turkey being an EU member state would mean the UK having a land border with Syria, Iraq and Iran.

She was offered the chance to retract those lies recently. She declined. The dishonesty continued during a visit to the USA, where one speech she gave suggested a potential problem with her grasp of reality. It included “The UK’s made its choice, to leave a trading bloc that is pushing a regulatory system on the rest of the world, and we’ve gone on the side of the table with those who believe in outcomes-based regulation consistent with our common law”.

There was more. “We’ve decided to take back our seats in international fora, to shape the reform agenda, to work to rebuild our capacity to do so, and to plug ourselves back into the global economy. That is our choice. And now America has a choice to make. How will she respond?”

Derisive laughter, perchance? The idea that, as an EU member state, the UK was not part of the global economy is not one that stands serious analysis. After telling the US that it should be on our side against the EU, she concluded “because peace and prosperity don't happen by accident”.

Which is true, except that the peace and prosperity is what the EU brought within Europe. Alex Andreou noted that “Mordaunt is framing Brexit as a war and telling America it has a responsibility to be on our side and against the EU”. Delusional as well as dishonest. And we’re not finished on the latter.

As Disability News Service reported back in 2016, “The minister for disabled people misled a Commons committee about the government’s pledge to halve the disability employment gap … less than two minutes after she began giving evidence”. She was told she had lied. A press release from the DWP confirming it was quoted to her. She dismissed the evidence with “The press release you refer to I have not been able to find”.

This matters: current front runner Rishi Sunak had a mare on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning under relatively mild questioning, Liz Truss, who came third with MPs, has been late getting her leadership campaign going, and Mordaunt is, it seems, firm favourite with Tory members. So if she makes the final two, it looks like she’ll be the next Prime Minister.

Which means swapping one delusional liar for another. We are so screwed.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton