In defence of Penny Mordaunt

So often, throwaway lines from the Spectator end up splashing national newspapers. This time, the splash has come from Penny Mordaunt, who won the ‘Speech of the Year’ gong in the Mastercard/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards on Thursday. Her acceptance speech has ended up splashing the Mail on Sunday. Here’s the story:-

A female Tory Minister made a spoof Commons speech on animal welfare in order to say an obscene word after a dare at a dinner with Navy officer friends. Communities Minister Penny Mordaunt said ‘c**k’ six times, ‘lay’ or ‘laid’ five times and mentioned the names of at least six officers during a debate on poultry welfare.

I will confess to my own journalistic failings here: I stood right next to her as she spoke and did not think that the remarks she just had delivered (with the full audio posted on CoffeeHouse that day) contained a potential newspaper splash. Here’s what happened. We gave out nine awards, hers was ‘Speech of the Year’ won for her hilarious Loyal Address. I read out the commendation, and may have unwittingly set up her up for this fall. I congratulated her “post-feminist masterpiece” of a speech for its string of innuendo. Winners make a short acceptance speech (here’s all nine of them) and Penny wasn’t expecting to win. So she ad-libbed and said that, if we liked innuendo, well her Loyal Address was nothing. She managed to get the word ‘cock’ into a Commons speech several times as a forfeit imposed on her by her Royal Navy colleagues during a dinner (she serves in the Navy as a reservist). Look up Hansard, she urged those in the room, you’ll see. Here is her ‘confession’ in full:-