Penny Mordaunt’s worst trait

Right-wingers appear not to be terribly keen on Penny Mordaunt. Toby Young read her book Greater: Britain After the Storm and didn’t like what he found. Nor did Will Lloyd, over at UnHerd, who wrote that: ‘Mordaunt tacks to the centre, but ends up on the managerial left. What she writes sounds like it was dredged from a particularly poor speech given at Davos five years ago.’ Sam Ashworth-Hayes even goes so far as to suggest she would be better suited to leading the Labour party. Here we must draw the line. The Labour party is more than capable of anointing its own ideologically unsuited leaders, thank you very much.

To her conservative critics, Mordaunt is not just liberal: she’s alarmingly woke. They despair that a sizeable section of the rank-and-file seems to love her. (Whether it actually loves her or reckons a female Heracles is needed to clean out the Johnsonian stables is another matter.)