Anyone but Penny. Kemi is great, but won't win.

I am far away from England but Liz Truss looks vulgar and is stupid too. We had that with Theresa May. (Liz told Sergey Lavrov that we could not allow Russia to hold Rostov-on-Don.) Penny is a good speaker but idle, probably stupid and not a Tory. I like Kemi best but she has no chance. Rishi looks like a pound shop Blair, but intelligent and might be a Tory.

Someone said today -

If we ask the BBC nicely do you think they might let us have Boris Johnson back?

David Cameron takes pride in having transformed the ranks of male, pale, stale Tory MPs and added women and minorities in big numbers, but the quality of the MPs is lower than it was in the 1980s, even though Margaret Thatcher never found a successor whom she liked. How very much more talented were Labour in the 1970s, when they grievously misruled the country.

Penny is the worst. The Andrea Leadsom of this election. Charles, Lord Moore, who previously drew public attention to her opinion that a woman can have a penis and men can be pregnant, said yesterday in the Telegraph:

"I know several ministers who worked with Ms Mordaunt in various departments. They agree privately with what Lord Frost is saying in public – that she did not do the work or know the stuff; she was often absent from meetings. In the early, desperate days of Covid, forexample, she was the minister for civil contingencies. The most urgent anxiety was the lack of ventilators. She failed to remedy this. In the end, a minister junior to her had to step in to sort it out."

The Mail on Sunday today:

"Penny Mordaunt left a job because she was so ‘incompetent’ that she couldn’t organise a tea party in a park, ‘the Tory equivalent of a p***-up in a brewery’, her former boss said yesterday.

"Lord Moylan said the Tory leadership hopeful quit the role of head of communications for Kensington and Chelsea Council in London because she ‘couldn’t do the job’."

Dominic Lawson today in the Sunday Times:

"I remember a couple of years ago a very senior soldier who had worked for several defence secretaries saying that, of all those he had dealt with, Mordaunt (briefly in that job at the end of the May administration) was the worst. When asked the reason, he was blunt: “Couldn’t take a decision.”


"I also recall someone with whom she worked (in a ministerial role) telling me that while Mordaunt was a good performer at the dispatch box, “On anything to do with policy she was all over the place, or absent.” Apparently this gained her the in-house nickname of Penny Dormant.

"....So Mordaunt was moved and is now a minister in the department for trade. But the story remains the same: one of her colleagues there — and it’s telling that none of her ministerial team is backing her leadership bid — told the City AM paper that Mordaunt had been “missing for months” and had refused to go to Indiana to sign a trade agreement her officials had negotiated. When asked why, the official said, “I have no f***ing idea.” Others do: it clashed with a promotional tour for her book Greater: Britain after the Storm."

This is Peter Hitchens on when Tom Tugendhat called for the great Tory philosopher Sir Roger Scruton to be fired from his unpaid job because of a completely groundless accusation of anti-Semitism. (Sir Roger certainly did not consider homosexuality something to celebrate or take pride in, on the other hand.)

"The Left will win in the end because it recognises no limit on how wicked it can be to get its way. It will also win because the ‘Conservative’ Party is a rabble of cowards, which is so afraid of the Left it runs away from a fight before it has even been attacked. 

"Interestingly, two of the worst poltroons in the Scruton case were Tory MPs who certainly don’t keep quiet about their military careers – Tom Tugendhat and Johnny Mercer."

Matthew Taylor on Rishi: Least convincing hand on heart (and every other hand gesture) and oiliest answers.

So, anyone but Penny. Liz awful. Kemi great but won't win. Must we settle for Rishi?