E is for Elysium

Week E | Tuesday/Wednesday | Penny Mordaunt’s Mystery Novel

I read Penny Mordor’s book so you don’t have to. Apologies that this post is a day late. It was 40° here yesterday, too hot to think straight. Because, unfettered capitalism. Speaking of which.

Don’t be fooled by the title. Greater: Britain After the Storm is a non-fiction book, not a Stephen King-style apocalyptic novel. Well, then again, it’s sort of both those things. It was published on 21 January 2021. Anything else interesting happen in January 2021? No? Say, around the 6th? Well, anyway. Remember that date for the end.

Not a Nadine Dorries book. Every cloud.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this book is that it was praised by Elton John and Tony Blair, disliked by Toby Young. The criticisms of Mordaunt during the light-speed Tory leadership battle from her own party have mostly been of the ‘she’s too WoKe’ variety, including from bulwark-against-modernity The Spectator, and the mostly-unheard UnHerd. Less raspberry-trousered commentators have concurred without the opprobrium, describing Mordaunt as ‘socially liberal’. If you listen carefully, holding the Guardian to your ear like a paper seashell, you can hear the added whisper, “For a Tory.”

We all scream

On a surface read, if you don’t know anything about Penelope Mordaunt, Greater is line with all of that. It’s got buzzwords and grand Blairite proclamations about how super Britain could be if it just got off its arse and tried, like the 2012 Olympics Opening and Closing ceremonies in wishful thinking form. Things can only get better. It’s the book version of loads of people being shown a picture of Penny last week and thinking she was Adele.

I’ve reread my June pre-PM-resignation profile of her today, and thought perhaps the conclusions I’d reached were backed up largely by inference, adding up two and two to make five, which would be unusually lax for me. I started out as an academic researcher and am as scrupulous as I can manage. But I’m also highly intuitive. I know I’m right about her, and I know that because I know it. The way I know when it’s going to rain, or can find my way to any stationery shop without a map.

Besides, she herself left the trail of breadcrumbs to the witch’s house, despite her own best efforts. (The house is located within a gated community in a charter city, in which the roads are named for the trees cut down to lay them).

There are two Penny Mordaunts, and you can find them both in Greater, but the other one, Penelope, the one we’ll see when and if she gets her feet under the table as PM, is not woke or even apparent, per se. You have to read between the lines. She is not too socially liberal for Tories and not not liberal enough for not-Tories, not Schrodinger’s Twat. She’s something else entirely. She’s a Republican. A Republican as they are now, not as they were. Has anyone seen Paul Ryan lately? Because I think Penny Mordaunt is Paul Ryan with a wig on. On leg day.

When launching her candidacy for Tory leader, Mordaunt said she was “a fresh start”, offering herself as a break from the Johnson custardarmageddonathon and a return to one nation conservatism for the modern age. She’s strategically kept her head down so that few know anything about her. She sees this as a strength, a clean slate if you will, whereas some think this is a terrible time to be going with an inexperienced unknown.

Rishi Sunak’s cheerleaders describe her as economically illiterate, and Liz Truss’ team say Mordaunt needs stabilisers to ride the Prime Ministerial bike or jet or whatever. Which, let’s face it, IS A BIT RICH COMING FROM THEM. If you’ll excuse the pun. Some former colleagues allegedly call her Penny Dormant.

Straighten up and fly far right.

But she’s not inexperienced. She’s held varied portfolios over 12 years, learned the game. She’s kept her views bland and away from such extremes as Dorries dottiness or Fabricant frothing. She’s been a closed book. She’s not a confused Thatcher cosplayer like Truss, or a bawdy, last-days-of-Rome Johnsonite. It’s her careful sidestepping of him, her avoidance of his cabinet that is her strength and her weakness. She isn’t covered with his party stank or his Russian malodour. She was never invited to the party in any sense, that we know of. So she won’t be more of the same. That’s a relief, at least. Let’s face it, the last 3.5 years have been, and continue to be, exhausting.

So what is she? She’s a member of the European Research Group. I’ll be writing about them this week. It’s quite remarkable to me how few people have mentioned this, in the press or elsewhere. It tells you so much about her, if you remember that they aren’t just about Brexit. It is my considered view that Mordaunt isn’t lacking in conviction or clear views or solutions, despite her two debate appearances suggesting exactly that. I believe she’s playing that dangerous game called Chameleon. She’ll be whatever you want her to be until she wins the Iron Throne. Dormant, indeed. Like a volcano.

Penny Mordaunt is nothing if not determined and driven. She gets what she wants. So what does she want? Does Greater offer any clues?

It’s co-written with her adviser Chris Lewis, who calls himself ‘the Grand Enchilada’, which makes him sound like a right dickhead. He’s a multimillionaire PR agency boss, and author of books on business leadership. It’s hard to know what in Greater is hers or his, but obviously she stands by whatever the Great Burrito thinks, as she allowed it to go to print.

The glowing foreword is by none other than Bill Gates. Does a junior ministerial nonentity, as painted by her critics, strike you as someone with the pull to obtain such a foreword? Curiouser and curiouser. It must surely be Lewis’ connections, along with getting Blair, John, and Richards Curtis and Branson to read it. Or claim to have read and enjoyed it. But then again, who knows? We don’t know her. Which was the plan.

The ERG right now.

The book is an adjectivally-overloaded, under-spiced meal of two courses. The first bumbles about trying to define what Britain is through a mishmash of lenses, disciplines, and florid descriptions. Know and slag off thine enemy, while claiming to love and wish it well. We’re mostly lazy drunks who could be heroes if we’d let Penny and Chris make us see sense. The second part is equally confused in its search for a way to reunite the country and bring it back from the brink after the divisions and catastrophes of Brexit, which she very much helped to bring about.

The right nowadays, if they want to carry on business as usual without transparency or accountability, just don’t keep records. That is, either they don’t keep records in the first place, or they delete the ones they couldn’t avoid creating. If the public can’t see it, it never happened, see? Hocus pocus! Magic trick. That’s Greater. It’s full of unexplained references to ‘modernising’, mentioned as often as Tory candidates say ‘delivery’. (Which is a lot. I used that word for a drinking game during the second debate, and had to be rushed to A&E in an ambulance. Or would have been, if there were any).

This isn’t a standard book review, because I’m barely talking about the book. But that’s because there’s no there there. It’s a shell game, a sleight of hand. There are few to no details about how the country is to be renovated and redesigned, because if she tipped her hand, Penny wouldn’t get to do it. She knows best and we should just let her put all our personal knick-knacks away and change our orange sofa to navy blue so she can make our country more neutral and attractive to the highest bidder. Vibes:

Chris Lewis, though British, moved his family to the US west coast. Mordaunt worked for George W. Bush, twice, and has visited the US a number of times in her role as Trade Minister, patching together Memoranda of Understanding for US-UK trade relationships. Despite her British Forces appeal, bigging up her naval experience under the Union Jack into more than it is, all I see when I look at her is the U S of A. Big hair, perfect teeth, nude-coloured pumps, matching handbags that aren’t too matchy-matchy. GOP-trained. A PR expert, you guys. Just saying, y’all.

Dreaming of Leg Day

Rachel Maddow warned repeatedly in the Trump era, “Don’t watch what they say, watch what they do.” Mordaunt hasn’t been vocal about her views on reproductive rights, but today it came out that her PR firm Media Intelligence Partners lobbied for the Christian Medical Fellowship, which opposed abortions even in cases of rape, while she was still a company director and shareholder. She never references the ERG, so others mostly leave her out of it too. She’s never mentioned anything about charter cities in her anodyne appearances. However.

Penny Mordaunt’s booky wook

Not greater. ERG-er. Elysium. For her, anyway.

Mordaunt’s vision is to take government out of the equation except as a fixer, let private finance take over most things a government would traditionally do, and have charities pick up the slack in partnership with commerce. It’s a public-private finance initiative writ large, except without the public bit. Tax-write-off donations, not taxes. Don’t look at what she says, look at what she says:

These excerpts are from Google Books, by the way.

I absolutely see the attraction of Penny Mordaunt. If she has a personal life she can foist every rancid detail of on us as bread and circus distractions, we don’t know of it. But who better to give us the clean slate we long for than a clean slate libertarian? When she says she supports low taxes, she doesn’t mean what you think she means, y’all.

Freeports and charter cities, deregulated dystopia. For you, not her, obvs.

It’s amusing to me that Greater is so bland, so careful, so contradictory. As is so often the case with Tories, it’s not clear whether it’s incompetence or they meant to do that. But despite the greige contents, a low-fat oatmeal with red, white, and blue sprinkles, plenty is given away. I’m glad I read it, if only for that reason: my instincts are true. And the red, white, and blue sprinkles aren’t just those of the UK’s flag.

When Mordaunt extols the success of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s electoral appeal to middle America, hints at crafting a version of his agenda for the United Kingdom, and speaks of “empowering the silent majority,” she offers a glimpse of an ominous possible future for the Conservative Party.

Andrew Noravcsik, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2022

Johnson laid the groundwork by testing the limits of what we’re all prepared to put with without joining Steve Bray at Parliament. It turns out that’s loads. What will Penelope ‘Storming’ Mordaunt build on it, if we let her? What’s left after a storm?