Watching Boris Johnson flounder in the twilight of his premiership one couldn’t help but feel that the outgoing Prime Minister had somehow, to apply the words of Cardinal St John Henry Newman, served as a breakwater against errors more fundamental than his own.
With his departure, Penny Mordaunt is emerging as a serious candidate to succeed him and if she wins, what the country will get in the place of Johnson is a leader who will be more authoritarian, more ideological, more woke, more anti-life, anti-freedom, and probably more anti-family and anti-marriage.
Her record suggests that she will be a leader for whom social conservativism and the traditional values that have always been a key component of the Conservative movement will matter even less than they did for Johnson.
For the moment, the International Trade Minister is doing a good job playing the patriotic and military card like a character in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum – a series she says she despises – and promising to be a sure and safe hand on the tiller.
She has been getting away with it because most people don’t know who she is, and perhaps they like the cut of her jib. She looks and sounds like a Conservative but “conservative” she is not.
Although Ms Mordaunt was baptised a Catholic and educated at the Oaklands Roman Catholic School Academy in Waterlooville, Hampshire, she seems not even remotely attuned to the core Christian values that have always informed British culture. On the contrary, she appears overtly hostile to them.
For one, she has signed up to the ideology of gender. She plays it down when exposure in the media might pose a threat to her ambitions yet continues to prevaricate publically about what a woman is or isn’t.
“I think it was Margaret Thatcher who said, ‘Every prime minister needs a Willie’,” she joked when she launched her leadership campaign in Parliament. “A woman like me doesn’t have one.”
Yet behind the jesting lurks a serious statement of intent because Ms Mordaunt is implying that she believes there are women who do have penises, but just not women like her.
So it would be reasonable to conclude that as Prime Minister Ms Mordaunt will promote and champion an ideology of gender which preaches, with great intolerance for those who dissent, that people can pick and choose whatever sex they decide to be.
As a nation, the British people are already seeing the profoundly disturbing implications of this ideology when it is taught to children, or when it disbars women from fair competition in sports, or compromises the security, safety and privacy of bathrooms, changing areas, hospital wards and prisons. Objections are met with acts of aggression, often made with apparent impunity. Think of the threats, dismissals and cancellations that have involved women like JK Rowling, Julie Bindel, Maya Forstater, Suzanne Moore and others. Those who support the ideology of gender are not on their side.
Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the country might also get assisted suicide if Ms Mordaunt were chosen as PM, given that she has been active in the campaign to change the law since 2010, the year she was elected to Parliament.
Within months she was a founding chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Choice at the End of Life, a vehicle to fight for assisted suicide and euthanasia and supported with secretarial assistance by Dignity in Dying, the group formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
That same year Ms Mordaunt also became the only MP to accept an appointment to the Commission on Assisted Dying of Lord Falconer, which was later criticised in a motion by the British Medical Association for bias because a significant majority of members “are publically in favour of assisted suicide and euthanasia”.
Ms Mordaunt was among those members to whom the BMA referred, having told a newspaper in Portsmouth that she wanted the law changed. “My personal view is that assisted dying should be allowed for the terminally-ill,” she said.
Oddly, she abstained from the 2015 vote which saw the Assisted Dying Bill of Labour MP Rob Marris thrown out of the Commons by 330 votes to 118.
But that does not mean that she has changed opinions which would be significant if she were to become PM.
Johnson came to conclusion last summer that he would not allow time for an almost identical Bill introduced by Baroness Meacher to progress through Parliament, making its failure inevitable, but in the same scenario Ms Mordaunt may not only sympathetic to the passage of such legislation but may actively support it. In view of her previous activism, there is a real risk that her Government may bring forward its own Bill to legalise assisted suicide and even euthanasia.
Naturally, she is also fiercely pro-abortion and of all the candidates standing for the Conservative leadership none has voted for pro-abortion measures more than she has, a total of eight occasions. Ms Mordaunt has never once voted in favour of life, not even for moderate measures such as those to restrict the sex-selective abortions of baby girls simply because they are female.
Rather, she is said to be close to the lobbyist and abortion groups seeking more permissive legislation, giving rise to fears that she will seek to enshrine and protect abortion as a human right in British law – possibly on demand and even up to birth.
After a visit to BPAS (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service), the largest private abortion provider in the UK which drives most of the campaigning work for further liberalisation of the law, she tweeted her support.
Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who campaigns unremittingly for permissive abortion laws, persuaded the Government to impose abortion on Northern Ireland against the wishes of the vast majority of the people there but says she couldn’t have done it without Ms Mordaunt taking up the cause at a time when the consensus among senior Conservatives was that abortion should remain a devolved matter.
Ms Mordaunt’s intervention is significant because it reveals a totalitarian impulse in her approach to issues of conscience, her willingness to legislate against the wishes of the people and to be their master rather than their servant. Her well-documented desire to restrict Press freedom shows a similar authoritarian strain.
Incidentally, Tom Tugendhat, the other Catholic in the leadership race, also pressed for abortion to be extended to Northern Ireland he has also voted to legally redefined marriage to include same-sex couples. He remains very much an outsider in the race, however.
But not Ms Mordaunt. What the Conservatives perhaps ought to ask themselves at this time, therefore, is whether they want someone in the mould of Stella Creasy or Baroness Meacher running the country as well as their party.
Does the country really want its own version of a globalist authoritarian like Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand who has decriminalised abortion and legalised euthanasia while relentlessly exercising her penchant for locking down the people of her land on the grounds that depriving them of their liberties is good for their health? It is a sad fact that wherever you get a tin-pot woke leadership it legislates against life and the family while locking down whenever it can – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, you name it. At least Johnson kept the pubs open on New Year’s Eve. Would Ms Mordaunt have done the same? Who knows, but in November 2020 she suggested that England might have to prepare for at least three further lockdowns, and not just the one that ran from January to the following May. Why did she have to take that idea to the public?
Ms Mordaunt boasts that she is the candidate that the Labour Party fears most. She plainly isn’t. She is surely the candidate the Left likes the best.
On social matters, she is practically one of them and under her premiership she will destroy any vestige of social conservativism that still remains within the Conservative Party.
She claims she is “not out of touch” but my bet is that her wokery would cost the Tories the Red Wall. The people who voted for Mr Johnson in 2019 did not do so because he was woke or because they had a sudden rush of affection for a clownish priapic old Etonian but probably because they saw him as a breakwater against so much that was worse, including the imposition of authoritarian ideology.
Sure, they also wanted Brexit done but taking control of the UK’s borders and asserting British sovereignty is only a part of a reaction against threats to territory, culture, tradition and democracy, much of which is dear to the people in these constituencies.
Ms Mordaunt’s ideology makes her indistinguishable from many Labour or Liberal Democrat politicians. Perhaps under her leadership, there may be a return to the situation in which there is little to distinguish between the main political parties too. What chance of holding the North then? There will be little to persuade voters to ignore their tribal loyalties for a second time and it is likely that many will return to Labour while others will turn to the fringes.
Labour will have to look only slightly electable to probably win by a large majority when the time comes for the party to go up against an authoritarian, philosophically bankrupt and bitterly divided Government. With nothing Conservative about them, this time the Tories won’t know where to begin to pick up the pieces in the aftermath.
The way to avert such a disaster for the Conservative Party would be to appoint a leader who is truly a conservative. Ms Mordaunt is the wrong choice.
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