Has Penny Mordaunt's broadside done more harm than good?

A quick resumé of the member for Portsmouth North’s career to date: Defence secretary for two months then managed to lose a Conservative Party leadership election to Liz Truss (some achievement) then became famous for holding a couple of swords aloft for an hour or so on national television in a show that wasn’t Game Of Thrones.

Did I miss anything?

You remember the pommel-gripping achievements, I’m sure. It was on the occasion of the Coronation of King Charles. As Lord President of the Council, Ms Mordaunt was responsible for carrying two ceremonial blades during that oh-so-solemn shindig. First came the 17th century Sword of State, second was the “slightly lighter” (according to society magazine Tatler) 19th century Jewelled Sword of Offering.

The headline on that week’s Private Eye summed it up nicely for those of us in the cheap seats who can’t be bothered with this sort of thing. “Man in hat sits on chair,” it read in large black letters on an otherwise blank front page. I’m sure there was an equally gushing appraisal of Ms Mordaunt’s scene-stealing performance inside.

Buoyed, perhaps, by all that Rule Brittania pomp and arcane Hogwartsian ceremony, and empowered by the description of her as a “pop culture figure who spawned a million memes following her star turn at Westminster Abbey” (Tatler again), Ms Mordaunt really let rip when she crossed the Border to be a guest on political pundit Iain Dale’s Fringe show.

Fed an easy question by Mr Dale, and recognising an open goal when she saw it, she took aim at the SNP, its governance of Scotland and in particular its approach to the issue of independence.

It was quite a lecture, though the sort where you learn something very different from what the speaker actually intended.

“If you approach the thing that you’re trying to get done with real bile and hatred, which is quite often the sentiment that comes across from the SNP, I think you’re going to fail,” she said of the independence project. “Movements based on that kind of politics I don’t think are ever successful.”

She didn’t stop there.

“It is part of the default setting of the SNP that they are going to play victims,” she added. “They reduce what is a fierce and powerful nation to a narrative about victimhood and that winds me up.”

Clearly still wound up, she accepted an offer to expand upon that theme in the pages of the Daily Express, a newspaper which spent the first decade of this century banging on about Princess Diana and the second obsessing about the weather. So not everyone’s idea of a quality read. Then again, its logo is a sort of Crusader dude with the Cross of St George on his shield and a spear in his hand. And spears are bit like swords, right? You can see why she said yes.

And so she let rip again. Scots have been “monumentally let down” by the SNP, she wrote. “Self-serving, slopey-shouldered separatism has run its course,” she wrote.

And the instruction to us gullible citizens from our long-serving and democratically elected party of government? It is this, apparently: “Forget you are the nation of the Coldstream Guards, The Black Watch and Shimi Lovat’s commandos. Forget you are a nation of high-tech, aspirant, hard-working, young, multinational, intelligent, inventive and successful achievers. Forget your family across the rest of the UK. You are the nation of the eternally beaten and self-pitying.”

Portsmouth North MP Penny Mordaunt, photographed in 2019 (Image: PA)

Leaving aside the questionable legacy of Coldstream Guards founder General Monck, the fact that the Scottish Government-funded National Theatre of Scotland was still touring a play called Black Watch well into the SNP’s second term in government, and all that preposterous stuff about effectively disowning family members living elsewhere in the UK – when has our government ever asked us to forget our achievements? Our inventiveness? Our technical va-va-voom or muscular internationalism?

Was it last year when former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said in a manifesto launch speech that “when I look at the world today, there is so much that I know that Scotland can offer. We have the natural resources and the human talent to play a key role in solving the global challenges of the 21st century”?

READ MORE: PENNY MORDAUNT IS ADVERT FOR INDEPENDENCE

Was it in any of the many other speeches where SNP politicians have said more or less the same thing? No. In fact it’s because of those qualities that proponents of independence for Scotland, those who describe themselves as utilitarian nationalists anyway, believe so deeply that it can succeed. Still, it’s nice that Ms Mordaunt took the time to come up for the Fringe and hector and insult us.

As for approaching issues with bile and hatred, well that’s rich. I mean who in Scottish governmental circles can go toe-to-jackboot with Conservative Party deputy chair Lee Anderson, who said last week that asylum seekers who don’t like being housed on barges should “f*** off back to France”? And in the portfolio of nasty billboard campaigns, what do we have that can match the Tories’ notorious ‘Go home’ posters, which were investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority over concerns they were “reminiscent of slogans used by racist groups to attack immigrants in the past”?

Someone help me out here.

To be fair to Ms Mordaunt for a moment, the problem she has is that Westminster Tories always view Scotland’s push for self-determination through the prism of the right-leaning nationalism afflicting the nether regions of their own party. The sort which does whip up resentment of the Other. The sort which is driven by “hyperbole, hysteria and hatred.” The sort which does perhaps deploy a sense of victimhood to further its aims. That pesky EU? They’re robbing our brave NHS of £350 million a week. Let’s stick that on the side of a bus.

But there’s another way to look at Scottish nationalism, equally valid, which frames it as a progressive cause. Not much mention of that in Ms Mordaunt’s broadside.

She’s right in her assumption that the SNP government is in trouble, though, and the independence cause with it. The party has a new leader who inspires little confidence in the electorate (psephologist Sir John Curtice points to Humza Yousaf’s lack of charisma as a key factor in the party’s slump in the polls). It has an old leader who resigned unexpectedly and has since been arrested (though released without charge.) And a leader before the leader before the new one who chips in unhelpfully from the sidelines, like those folk you get at the football.

Or visiting Tory MPs.

If my opening Catherine Deneuve gag appears glib, it shouldn’t. Ms Mordaunt may actually have had two unsuccessful tilts at the Tory leadership (she stood against Rishi Sunak as well), but she has undoubted star quality within the party. That’s why she was invited to Edinburgh in the first place. That’s why the event had to be shifted to a larger venue to accommodate the crowd. Like Deneuve back in the day, she has pulling power.

Assuming Labour win the next UK general election – not exactly a stretch – the Tories will be looking for a new leader. Though the bookies judge Kemi Badenoch most likely to get her mitts on the poisoned chalice, Ms Mordaunt is second favourite. Third time lucky, eh?

Not for many north of the Border. Though it will have been cheered by some, Ms Mordaunt’s ill-judged and vitriolic broadside against Scotland’s elected government is something we are not likely to forget.