Mordaunt the Racist

Mordaunt and the image that will haunt her forever, at King Charles’ coronation

Earlier this week, at a staged interview at the Festival Fringe with Iain Dale, the statuesque Tory of no discernable ability other than swallowing swords, Penny Mordaunt, declared the SNP was nothing more than a disher out of ‘real bile and hatred’, their bare bums pointing towards the English, as opposed to fake bile and hatred. Then again, dimwitted Tory bigots usually think irony is something a wife does on a Saturday before the shopping at Waitrose.

What of Mordaunt’s record as a Mother Theresa figure, or the Statue of Liberty? Zilch. She still stands accused of inflating her naval record to the heady heights of commander, or perhaps it was ship’s wooden figurehead on the Mary Rose. Ambition radiates off Mordaunt like steam of a mealy pudding in a boiling pot. If she has a soupcon of intelligence she keeps it well under lock and key. Her persona of a Tory landowner’s wife caught in a downpour, rain ruining her makeup, one Ugg boot stuck in a cowpat, and shouting imperious instructions for an umbrella, blurs into nothingness and life goes on as before.

She has definitely modelled herself on some existing aristocrat or other, her affected regal bearing, her sniffyness, her tendency to look down her nose at anything that moves and is not subservient. We know her vanity will trip her up one day, the blistering public put down of a vagrant denied some small change, an aside not head office approved, the financial venture on the wrong side of legal, that woman in the street telling her to bog off, she doesn’t want to buy any Tupperware.

Columnist Kevin McKenna tilts at her inability to edit her comments, and also how Humza Yousaf is managing to muffle his troublesome fartbergers. Ach! Don’tcha just love English plonkers invited to our international Festival of Arts and goodwill who tell us we are inadequate and nasty?

AN ADVERT FOR INDEPENDENCE

by Kevin McKenna

Previous interventions and her own Commons voting record indicate that she thinks a floating barge barely fit for human habitation is too good for the scraps of humanity seeking refuge here. {England.] In an updated version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch she’d be the one saying: “Floating shoe-box and fire hazard with two adults to a room you can barely swing a cat in? Luxury.”

Within the Westminster Tories, in ascending degrees of blimpishness there’s the common-or-garden right; the hard right; the Jacob Rees-Mogg hang-the-blighters-high right … and Penny Mordaunt. During the Brexit campaign she had claimed that the UK would be unable to stop Turkey joining the EU. It was a vicious little intervention designed to appeal to the racist instincts that characterised the entire Leave campaign. Then-Tory leader David Cameron was compelled to correct her. “Let me be clear,” he had said. “Britain and every other country in the European Union has a veto on another country joining. That is a fact.”

Her Commons voting record channels Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. “Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings. And call off Christmas.”

She’s always advocated more diligent enforcement of immigration rules and opposed the right to remain in the UK for EU nationals. She’s for mass surveillance of the rest of us for any sign of social malfeasance and feels that helping the long-term unemployed into jobs using public money is too good for them. She views any sign of geo-political turbulence as training exercises for the British armed forces.

In Scotland, we’re apt to be unkind about the low calibre of some of our politicians. And then Penny Mordaunt opens her mouth. She’s a walking, talking advert for independence.

Ms Mordaunt’s unhinged defamation of the entire Scottish independence campaign was, like her Brexit intervention, entirely without evidence. On social media many of us are too quick to describe as a lie that which is merely wrong or inaccurate. There is though, no other word to describe Ms Mordaunt’s description of the independence campaign.

It recalls the untruths at the heart of Better Together’s near-calamitous NO campaign during the 2014 independence referendum. Then, a host of Unionist politicians led by Ruth Davidson and her Scottish Labour glove-puppets had described the Yes campaign as nasty and divisive. They claimed that it was responsible for ripping apart families which, until then, had co-existed in a fugue of peace and harmony.

Thus, while the Unionist parties were professing to “stand up for Scotland” they spent the entire referendum campaign telling the world that the country they purported to love was a land of savages who couldn’t be trusted to behave civilly at a referendum. It was left to the UK Electoral Reform Society, who had monitored the campaign and vote, to praise the independence referendum as setting a “gold standard” in political and electoral engagement.

Yet, while the SNP will doubtless feed off Penny Mordaunt’s bouts of verbal incontinence they ought still to be vigilant. No one with any grip on reality would suggest that the Yes movement has ever been anti-English. Many in the SNP’s Westminster group have forged mutually respectful relationships across tribal lines at Westminster. And a glance at Alex Salmond’s roster of guests in his The Ayes Have It Festival Fringe debates reveals the cream of the English Unionist political and media establishment. The party. though, should be vigilant for the malignancy within its own groups at Westminster and Holyrood which has previously targeted its own. Prior to the Nicola Sturgeon era the SNP was blessed by a genuine spirit of unity based on family ties stretching back generations.

Yousaf’s coal sacks

Within a few short years, though, this party, with the tacit approval of the leadership, had been hollowed out by a pack of lumpen Sturgeon appointees. Their defining characteristics were unquestioning loyalty and an eagerness to hunt down and destroy the careers of those who dared to question her agenda. The extent to which her successor, Humza Yousaf can remove the toxicity which had lately contaminated the SNP will be a determining factor of his leadership. The early signs have been positive. As one party activist put it to me recently, “The adolescents have been told in no uncertain terms to cut out their playground antics.”

Mr Yousaf’s recruitment of the much-respected Kevin Pringle as his chief advisor is a giant step in the right direction. Meanwhile, the party’s recently-appointed Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn has already begun to foster a much more equitable atmosphere inside his group of MPs. When I interviewed Mr Flynn last week he was keen to stress this, even to the extent of expressing the hope that the exiled Angus MacNeil’s dispute with the party could be settled amicably.

Mr Flynn told me: “You can disagree without being disagreeable. I do disagree with people internally and externally but I try to do so in a way that’s civilised. I want them to all know that they can have different views and that they can come and speak to me about it at any time.”

The forthcoming by-election for the vacant Rutherglen and West Hamilton seat will probably come too soon for a party undergoing an intense period of transition and self-reflection. And, until the police investigation into the SNP’s finances is concluded one way or another they are in a state of stasis: unable to move beyond the remarkable events of the last few months until they know the final bill for the damage.

On Thursday lunchtime, though, the rest of us will have an opportunity to assess for ourselves if Mr Yousaf and Mr Pringle have been successful in their efforts to draw the poison within. That’s when Joanna Cherry will make her long-awaited appearance on stage at The Stand venue for an in-person event with the journalist, Graham Spiers.

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