Sometimes it seems that Penny Mordaunt wants us to greet her. She has built her campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Partyand to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, on her affinity with the armed forces and her connections with the Royal Navy (she is an honorary captain).
Mordaunt introduced her launch speech by linking herself to the Falkland conflict (which took place when she was nine years old), and her campaign video features 13 references to the armed forces.
She stated that she understood “perhaps better than any other candidate” the government’s responsibility to support the armed forces. This came as news to one of those other candidates, Tom Tugendhat, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he was wounded in combat.
As for her prominent backer, Conservative MP George Freeman’s claim that Mordaunt had “fought in the navy”, that was simply not true.
Misleading
As a highly decorated former naval officer told the Mail on Saturday: ‘She isn’t’ [currently] a trained or paid reservist, she has never been qualified or appointed. She’s been beating the sea drum for days, and enough is enough. How she presented herself – and how she allowed herself to be presented – has been deeply misleading.’
Penny Mordaunt (pictured last night on ITV) has faced new questions about her verdict for meeting a controversial Muslim group – despite being subject to a government boycott
The hopeful Tory leadership was a minister when they met Zara Mohammed, the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) (pictured)
There’s another reason why members of the Royal Navy would regard Mordaunt’s candidacy and its tone with a high degree of skepticism, and it comes from a tweet that Mordaunt, then a cabinet minister, on Feb. 19 last year placed .
“Great to meet @ZaraMO1 today, wish her the best of luck and hear more about her plans,” she tweeted. “I look forward to working with her and her team.”
ZaraMO1 is Zara Mohammed, and her ‘team’ is the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), of which she had been appointed secretary-general a few weeks earlier. But why would it be a problem that Mordaunt had tweeted enthusiastically about her meeting with Mrs. Mohammed?
Simply this: Since 2009, it has been the policy of successive British governments not to have official contacts with the Muslim Council of Great Britain.
In March of that year, the MCB’s deputy director-general, Dr. Daud Abdullah — along with 89 other “Muslim leaders” around the world — signed the so-called Istanbul Declaration, calling on Muslims to attack foreign navies trying to ban the smuggling of weapons into Hamas (called a terrorist organization by the British government) while it was fighting Israel.
It contained a series of ‘obligations’ to Muslims around the world, one of which warned that ‘closing crosswalks’ [to Gaza]or preventing the penetration of weapons through them should be regarded as high treason in the Islamic nation and clear support for the Zionist enemy’.
Penny Mordaunt, pictured, would not be a trained or paid naval reservist and was never qualified or enlisted
Miss Mordaunt tweeted last February that it was ‘wonderful’ to have met Zara Mohammed, the MCB’s first female secretary general, and said she was ‘looking forward to working with her’
At the time, the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had offered the Royal Navy funds to prevent weapons from being smuggled to Hamas fighters. But the statement signed by the MCB’s deputy director general stated that there was an obligation on “the Islamic nation to consider sending foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control borders and prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression’.
It concluded that ‘this must be rejected and combated by all means and means’.
Since this was a call for Muslims in this country (and worldwide) to attack all Royal Navy ships that ban arms supplies to Hamas, it was not surprising that the Labor government announced it would cut all involvement with the MCB .
That probably wouldn’t have happened if the organization had apologized for, or disowned, Dr. Abdullah’s signing of the Istanbul Declaration. The MCB refused, eventually claiming that its deputy director-general had signed it in “personal capacity.”
But the Brown administration pointed out that the only reason Dr. Abdullah’s signature had value to Hamas was that he was a leading figure in the body that claimed to represent all British Muslims (it isn’t, but that’s a other matter).
fierce
The MCB has never come back to this, which helps explain why every government since then has adhered to the policy of ‘zero official engagement’.
So it’s no surprise that Downing Street was furious when it learned of Penny Mordaunt’s meeting with the new chief of the MCB, and her publication of it. No. 10 issued a statement stating: ‘The UK government has a long-standing policy of not having contact with the MCB, and this has not changed.’
I have since determined, after speaking with an official this weekend, that No. 10 has asked Mordaunt to delete her tweet. She refused – even after Downing Street reminded her that our embargo stemmed from a threat to the Royal Navy.
Her office publicly claimed that she had not met the MCB chief in her capacity as a minister, but as ‘a constituency MP’. The point is that the MCB is headquartered in London and Mrs Mohammed lives in Scotland, which is quite a distance from Mordaunt’s constituency of Portsmouth. Of course, the MCB made a game of the minister’s meeting with his chief, by retweeting Mordaunt’s announcement of her meeting and welcoming Mrs Mohammed.
Conservative MP and British Trade Policy Secretary Penny Mordaunt arrives at the BBC in central London yesterday
As a British official said to me when I raised this with him yesterday: ‘I wonder how Penny Mordaunt’s Royal Navy colleagues felt when she broke the agreement not to meet representatives of an organization whose deputy director general called for attacks on their ships, he may have slaughtered some of our sailors.’
I doubt if Mordaunt’s motive at the time was to change government policy. It’s much more likely that she was excited about the idea of a woman taking the helm of the MCB.
That would fit – somewhat – the view, expressed in her book Greater: Britain After The Storm, that “the problem is that most of our leaders come from narrow backgrounds” which Mordaunt defined as, “Man…heterosexual.” white, Christian, western oriented’.
Her campaign for Tory leadership doesn’t sound like much – wise, given the nature of the voters – but makes it great that leadership is “more about the ship than the captain” and glorifies “teamwork.”
lightweight
What kind of team player was Mordaunt, first ignoring the long-agreed policy of not having contact with the MCB, then refusing the call from the team captain’s office (Boris Johnson) to use that self-promoting tweet about her meeting with Ms. Mohammed?
It’s actually possible that Mordaunt wasn’t aware of this official embargo, good as it is, and though, as a former Secretary of State for Defense – and especially as a Royal Navy reservist – it seems incredible that she didn’t know.
The truth is that Penny Mordaunt is someone with an extremely weak understanding of policies or details. A number of her former ministerial colleagues have recently pointed this out.
That trait became painfully clear in an interview she gave to the Daily Telegraph last week. She has promised two major tax cuts: halving the VAT on fuel and raising the vast majority of personal tax thresholds with the rate of inflation.
So she was (obviously) asked, ‘How much is this going to cost?’ Mordaunt had no idea and, after struggling for an answer, asked an assistant ‘to provide’ [the figure] later’.
She was then questioned about her promise to “be a pioneer of sound money, with a key fiscal rule to ensure that debt as a percentage of GDP declines over time.”
Of course the interviewer asked if she could say what the national debt is now as a percentage of GDP and where she wants to go. Again, no Scooby Doo (“I don’t have it in front of me”).
It’s terrifying that such a lightweight became the bookmakers’ favorite last week to win over the conservative leadership. I’m sure many in the armed forces share that sentiment, despite Penny Mordaunt’s inflated claims of being their candidate.