She comes across as serious, sensible and willing to take stances that are unpopular but thought through
Souce - Daily telegraph 12/07/22
Margaret Thatcher’s dramatic downfall occurred during the twin by-elections in the Scottish town of Paisley, just a few weeks after I had been appointed as Scottish Labour’s first ever full time press officer.
Our task was not only to defend the two previously safe Labour redoubts, but to put a brave face on Mrs Thatcher’s removal. She may have been a vote-winner in much of England, but in Scotland we relied on her to recruit discontented middle class voters; the 1987 election had seen a succession of Tory seats fall to Labour – seats which, had they been in England, would have been safely Conservative. The last thing we wanted was for her to be replaced by someone like Michael Heseltine, or even John Major. We had spent so long defining ourselves against Thatcherism that the task of tackling a new opponent was as daunting as it was unexpected.
Labour face the same problem today, albeit in a radically different form. Boris Johnson is the third Conservative prime minister they’ve faced in six years, and he will soon be replaced by a fourth. Still, the obsessive animosity the party has shown towards the current incumbent at Number 10 has been so intense and, frankly, unhinged, that Labour has allowed itself to be defined not just by Johnson but by the project that he did more than anyone else to facilitate: Brexit.
So what happens when Johnson is no longer there? How does the official opposition reconcile itself with the fight against a new opponent? Does it simply reinstitute its Orwellian two-minute hate against a fresh face? Or should it embrace a fresh approach?
Well, that depends on who that opponent is.
The favourite, Rishi Sunak, would pose all sorts of difficulties for a Labour Party that prides itself (with no particular justification) on being the voice of immigrants and minorities and the natural recipient of those groups’ support. On becoming prime minister, the former chancellor would immediately challenge that assumption, heralding a bout of soul-searching among progressives that mirrors what has happened across the Atlantic with the revelation that Latino voters are more inclined to support the socially conservative policies of the Republican party than previously assumed.
It says much about modern Britain, not to mention the Conservative Party itself, that Sunak’s ethnicity is no bar to his reaching for the highest office. But his economic record and his decision, very late in the day, to withdraw support from Johnson, might be. Johnson remains popular across swathes of the party grassroots and Sunak’s opponents – assuming he makes it onto the final ballot paper sent to members – will make much of his “betrayal”, in the same way that Thatcher die-hards could not bring themselves to support Heseltine after he wielded the knife.
There are a number of other candidates who, at the time of writing, Labour probably feels less anxious about facing in the run-up to a general election. Liz Truss, rightly or wrongly, is not rated by Labour MPs. Suella Braverman is similarly dismissed as a Brexit extremist and a lightweight.
Tom Tugendhat is an unknown quantity, not having served in a ministerial office, so Labour might be expected to be wary of the former soldier.
There are two candidates who would, I suspect, cause Keir Starmer the greatest number of sleepless nights. One is the former equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, who won large numbers of supporters after she made a barn-storming speech opposing critical race theory, and was duly and ferociously attacked as a “racial gatekeeper” by the kind of people Conservative activists (and others) love to wind up. Like Sunak, Badenoch’s own background has proved no disadvantage among her peers, and it says a great deal about her own abilities that she has gone from new MP to a serious contender for the top job in barely five years.
But it is the former defence secretary Penny Mordaunt who stands the best chance of giving Labour a run for their money come the next election. Silly mistakes in her launch video hardly matter; Mordaunt comes across as serious, sensible and willing to take stances that are unpopular but thought through. Her acceptance of the law on gender – that in a legal sense if no other, biological males can be recognised as women – is balanced by her praise for former Olympian swimmer Sharron Davies, who has campaigned to prevent trans woman from entering women’s sporting events.
Her sex matters not a jot to her party, but it matters a lot to the Labour Party, which, on Mordaunt’s election as leader, would enter another entertaining bout of self-reflection about its own alleged (though largely unfounded) misogyny and its failure ever to elect a female leader while the “regressive” Tories would have elected three.
But it is Mordaunt’s ability to appeal to both Left and Right that would make her Labour’s worst nightmare. She’s a Brexiter, but it doesn’t define her. She represents a chance for the country to start to heal the divisions caused by the referendum of 2016 and subsequent events. She is also enthusiastic about defending the Union, a subject that has rarely been addressed by her rival candidates but which will immediately demand the attention of the winner of this contest as soon as the ballot papers are counted.
Crucially, because she wasn’t in the cabinet when Johnson fell, she is innocent of the charge of either treachery or complicity. If you wanted the party and the government to recover quickly from the melodrama of recent events, choosing a minister from the sub-cabinet ranks would be a good idea. Who knows? Mordaunt may come to recognise her demotion by Johnson from defence secretary to minister of state as the key to her ultimate success.
Critics like to present any internal leadership election as “chaos”, even when “democracy” would be a more appropriate term. The single candidate “election” that delivered the top job to Gordon Brown without opposition in 2007 was efficient and rapid, bit it turned out to be a mistake in all sorts of ways; having a range of candidates of differing abilities battling it out is surely a preferable way to decide who becomes prime minister in a democracy.
Most of the candidates now vying for position have points in their favour, including the front runner, Sunak. But if the Conservatives are serious about holding back the Labour tide, or even reversing it, they will opt for Mordaunt.
Penny Mordaunt would see off every Tory leadership rival, grassroots poll shows
source - Telegraph 12/07/22
International trade minister leads field in series of run-offs carried out by Conservative Home website
Penny Mordaunt would beat all her Conservative leadership rivals in a head-to-head contest, new polling of the party’s grassroots suggests.
Ms Mordaunt, the international trade minister, led the candidates in a series of run-offs carried out by the Conservative Home website.
Kemi Badenoch, the former equalities minister, was second while Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, was third. Ms Badenoch would beat all her fellow candidates except Ms Mordaunt.
In fourth and fifth were Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, and Nadhim Zahawi, the Chancellor.
During previous contests, ConservativeHome surveys of party members and activists correctly predicted that Boris Johnson would become Prime Minister in 2019 and called the final two of Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom in 2016.
Ms Mordaunt would beat Rishi Sunak – who currently leads among MPs, with almost double the amount of her public endorsements – by 58 per cent to 31 per cent, according to a poll of 937 readers.
She would see off the “One Nation” candidate Tom Tugendhat by 61 per cent to 23 per cent, and Ms Truss by 51 per cent to 33 per cent.
Ms Badenoch led Mr Sunak by 56 per cent to 31 per cent in a run-off scenario. The former chancellor, who on Tuesday pledged a return to “traditional Conservative economic values” in his campaign launch speech, placed only sixth in polling of the membership.
Mr Sunak was shown to have a negative approval rating among readers of the website in a survey carried out earlier this month. His tax rises while at the Treasury led to criticism from figures on the Right of the party including Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Ms Badenoch also polled above Ms Braverman and Ms Truss, considered to be her main rivals to secure the Right-wing candidacy.
It is currently unclear how many of the leadership candidates will make it onto the ballot, as each requires the backing of 20 MPs, including a named proposer and seconder, by 6pm on Tuesday.
Ms Mordaunt, who currently appears to be second in the race for Number 10 on the basis of public support, has consistently polled as one of the top choices among Tory members in recent weeks despite her relative lack of top-level experience.
She is in her eighth ministerial role and served under Theresa May as the first female defence secretary, and was the international development secretary for two years.
Ms Badenoch, meanwhile, has spent the past two and a half years as an equalities minister in the Levelling Up Department. Her campaign is taking aim at identity politics and “wokery” while pledging to return to a low-tax trajectory.
Mr Sunak would beat Mr Tugendhat, Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid, the polling suggested, but would have less success against the rest of the field. Mr Hunt, the former health secretary, ranks bottom of the nine candidates polled and would lose in a run-off against every one of his competitors.
Comments
Post a Comment