The real Penny Mordaunt: ‘a workaholic with four cats and no social life’

If only Penny Mordaunt had known this time last year that to become the most popular Conservative politician in the country, all you needed to do was wield a sword in front of the King.

As Mordaunt walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey, a vision in teal blue and gold embroidery, it was as if she had set off a bomb on social media. And, for once, it was largely positive. One tweeter wrote: “Just wait until Penny M switches on her phone and discovers she’s won the internet today.” Her show-stealing performance in the coronation has propelled her to the front of the “next Tory leader” line.

“I knew it was going to be a big deal, but not necessarily for me,” Mordaunt says of her ceremonial role as lord president of the privy council and bearer of the Sword of State. “No one showed up and said, ‘This is what you’re going to be doing.’ It gradually evolved. Somebody said, ‘You may have a role in the coronation,’ but it wasn’t until the first rehearsal that I fully realised what it all entailed. It just grew and grew and grew.”

Carrying a sword and then presenting it to the King sounds a simple enough operation, but appearances are often deceptive. “I was told that the weight of the replica swords I held at rehearsals would be the same as the real one. I didn’t hold the real one until the dress rehearsal, 48 hours before the coronation; it was a lot heavier. All the weight is in the handle, which makes it unbalanced, trickier to keep still and difficult to walk with. I did have a holster to allow my neck to take some of the weight while standing, but when I was walking the sword had to be out of it. I was bouncing off the earl marshal the whole time as I was going up the aisle.”

“Once I knew I was going to have a role, I went to the privy council offices to see the court dress that my predecessors would have worn. It had a huge hat with it, but I knew it was not what the King really wanted. I didn’t have direct instruction from him but I took my steer from the brief that it would be a modern coronation for a modern king. I took some advice from Savile Row, who were very helpful. I then found Hand & Lock, who do embroidery. They did lots of different designs and mood boards.”

As many tweeters pointed out, the dress — designed by the London fashion house Safiyaa (a version without gold braiding could be yours for £1,200) — gave Mordaunt a distinctly Princess Leia vibe, albeit accessorised with a sword rather than a lightsabre. I ask how she felt when she first put it on. “It was at the dress rehearsal and it was, ‘Phew!’ The earl marshal was in charge of everything and he was happy with it, and it worked with all the bishops’ robes.”

Was there any part of her thinking, “Oh my God, what if I screw this up?” “There’s always a part of your mind that’s thinking about that, but you’ve prepared the best you can. I was joking with the three defence chiefs behind me at the altar, who all had various aches and pains, that there was the overwhelming smell of Voltarol. We’d all taken Nurofen because it was all a bit painful. But we were so caught up in the moment, which is exactly how it should be.”

I ask when she first became aware of the public reaction to her part in the service. “It wasn’t really until the journey home,” she says. “I saw the tweets asking if I’d been sponsored by Poundland because of the gold leaf logo, and there was one where I was holding a kebab. I loved it. Events like that remind us what we all have in common. They’re above day-to-day politics and Twitter spats. I was very conscious that you couldn’t miss me on the day, but I was only one of millions of people who were doing their bit. I’d met a police officer who had been on duty for 13 hours, which puts my 51 minutes into perspective.”

One MP told me that the reaction in the Women Tory MPs WhatsApp group was euphoric. When I mention this, Mordaunt laughs and tells me that various swords and lightsabres have been dropped off at her office. When I ask what she makes of reports that she’s now in prime position to replace Rishi Sunak when the time comes, her response is emphatic. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she says. “The story of that weekend is not about politics at all. It’s about the whole country, and service; people working together. I find all this talk a bit tedious ”

Mordaunt was born in Devon in 1973 with her twin brother, James. Her father was a paratrooper — she was named, she has said, after HMS Penelope — before retraining as a teacher. She was 15 and a pupil at Oaklands Catholic School in Hampshire when her mother, a special needs teacher, died of breast cancer. Her father was also diagnosed with cancer a year later, but survived. After reading philosophy at Reading University, Mordaunt worked in public relations. In 2005 she stood unsuccessfully as the Tory candidate for Portsmouth North, but was elected in 2010. Four years later she became a junior minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government, the first of many ministerial jobs, culminating in her appointment as defence secretary in May 2019. Less than three months later, after backing Jeremy Hunt in the leadership election, she was sacked by Boris Johnson.

Mordaunt stood in both leadership contests of 2022. In her first attempt, she came third behind Rishi Sunak and the winner, Liz Truss. When Truss imploded the following month, Mordaunt stood alone against Sunak. During her brief premiership, Truss gave Mordaunt her current job: leader of the House of Commons and lord president of the privy council. It’s a long job title for a position prime ministers usually give to people they want to keep out of the way. But if that was Truss’s plan, we can add that to her list of miscalculations because the job becomes pivotal in the event of a monarch’s death. Mordaunt began just two days before the death of Elizabeth II and quickly learnt she would be leading the accession ceremony two days later.

“I had no idea that it would involve doing the accession council,” she tells me. “On the Monday I was a junior trade minister, on Tuesday Liz Truss promoted me, on Wednesday we tried to have privy council, and the Queen was very keen to do it, but it wasn’t to be. On Thursday we had the sad news, and then on Friday I googled ‘accession council’.” She was clearly worried that the emotion of the occasion might run away with her. “Obviously you want to do a good job, but you can’t rehearse an accession council,” she says. “I have dyslexia [she was diagnosed in 2020], so that was an added pressure. I couldn’t mess up the words.”

I am taken aback by her next remark. “We had identified this as a moment of potential national peril for the country. How would people respond? We had the background of all that political turmoil. The country had been through quite a lot.” This is quite the understatement, given Brexit, Covid, the cost of living crisis and the ever-present Tory party soap opera. The country was divided and the one unifier, the Queen, was dead. “It was not a foregone conclusion that everything would go as brilliantly as it did. After I had delivered the accession council, I went outside into St James’s Palace yard. The guards did three cheers for the King and over the palace wall I could hear thousands of people cheering. At that moment, I knew it was going to be all right, and I literally burst into tears.

When Boris Johnson resigned last year, I made a list of the qualities I thought a good prime minister needed. Penny Mordaunt ticked the most boxes, but she lost. Why? Was it down to the scurrilous campaign waged against her by various newspapers and some of her opponents? Was it that she didn’t possess the ruthlessness her opponents were only too willing to display, or was it simply that she just didn’t want it enough?

“Democracy is never wrong,” she says, deflectingly. “I’m a democrat, ultimately. You have to go for things but you also have to be true to yourself. You have a choice of courses of action but if you care about your party and you care about how politics is conducted I’m just not going to do some of those things — it’s not who I am.”

Her opponents decided her apparent enthusiasm for trans rights was her weak spot, and they went for her all guns blazing. She was on the record in the House of Commons, during her time as equalities minister, saying, “Trans women are women, trans men are men.” This encouraged her opponents to portray her as someone in favour of self-ID and against women-only spaces, something she denied, but her denials had little impact.

“It was a pile-on,” she admits. “But I’m still here.” All very well, I say, but in dark moments you must think to yourself that you could have saved the country from Liz Truss’s disastrous 49-day premiership? She is unrepentant. “Genuinely, I don’t dwell on those things. You just have to look forward. Wherever you end up, including sometimes on the back benches, you just do your bit. I don’t want to do anything that trashes my party or my country. I want both to flourish. I don’t want to have those kind of regrets.”

I switch tack and ask why so many Brexiteers seem to have such an animus for Mordaunt, who also voted for Brexit — people like the Brexit negotiator Lord Frost and the cabinet minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan, both of whom worked with her at the Department for International Trade. She replies somewhat unconvincingly: “People pick candidates and they fight for those candidates. Once the contest is over, normal relations resume.”

Lord Frost did more to damage her campaign than anyone by alleging laziness, absence and worse. Surely she can’t forgive him? “I don’t dwell on that,” she says. “I have a track record of getting things done. People know that.” Has she spoken to Frost since then? “No, but I think that’s more about him than me.” Ouch. She continues: “If you dwell on these things and continue to rake them over and can’t forgive people, that’s a very negative way to live your life.”

I put it to her that, had she not had to contend with the controversy over her stance on trans issues, she would now be prime minister. “No, I don’t think so. It was a means that some people focused on. Even when you present people with factual evidence of what you did; when people who were in the department at the time [are] backing you up and saying, ‘No, this is what she did, that’s not true,’ it doesn’t make a difference to those individuals. It was a device. We should not be generating massive culture wars that set people against each other . We should be explaining and unifying people. That’s the sort of politician and person I am.”

I know what the answer will be, but I have to ask if she might go for a third leadership bid. After all, she needed only ten more MPs in October and she would have taken Rishi Sunak to a ballot. She gives me a knowing look and says, “It’s a controversial view, but I think a period of stability, calmness and effective government are what’s needed.” So that’s not a no, then. “Rishi has kept me in his cabinet and I’ve worked my socks off for him. Restoring trust is a big theme for him, and I can help in that. I’ve been loyal to every prime minister I have served under.”

Mordaunt might have expected a promotion from Sunak when he became prime minister in October. Had she not fought on to the bitter end in the leadership race, she was rumoured to be in line for the Foreign Office. However, she is unrepentant and continues to maintain that if she had got the votes needed to take the contest to the party membership, that’s what she would have done.

“People ask why I didn’t fold and do a deal,” she says. “There’s a very simple reason. For the sake of four days, we could have had a contest [among the members]. That would have been the best thing to do. But if we couldn’t have a contest, we had to demonstrate to people that one was not possible. If I had thrown the towel in, it would have sent a terrible message and undermined the outcome. I wasn’t running to negotiate a position. I was running to win.”

So can the Conservatives win the next election? Mordaunt makes no attempt to hide the difficulties facing her party, but she remains optimistic. “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think it entirely possible,” she says. “The electorate has not sealed the deal with Labour because they’re unsure what they really stand for. It is possible that we could do well. The prime minister understands we have to demonstrate competence and credibility on the issues that matter to people. A vision is needed, and we’ll see him start to set that out.”

Mordaunt turned 50 in March but, she tells me, “my most significant recent birthday was when I was 46. That’s the age my mother was when she died. I’m very comfortable with getting on a bit.”

“Wait till you get to 60,” I say, and follow up with an impertinent question about her love life. She married Paul Murray, a fellow Reading graduate, in 1999, but they divorced the following year and she has never remarried. “It is, of course, a mystery why a workaholic with no social life and four cats is not a massive draw,” she says sardonically. “I feel complete. I don’t need another half. I’m not ideologically opposed to the idea. If I meet someone, I meet someone. If I don’t meet someone, that’s absolutely fine.”

As I leave Mordaunt and walk over Westminster Bridge, my mind turns back to that list of qualities that a prime minister needs. The only box she didn’t tick is the one marked “killer instinct”. Could 51 minutes of sword-wielding fame be enough to change her fortunes?

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