“Mates rates” for private profit; Tory donors “flogging sub-standard face masks”; yes, even “sleazy jet trips to a private island” – Labour number two Angela Rayner came to the Commons this afternoon locked and loaded for a classic Tory sleaze shoot-out.
But at the other end of the bar stood Penny Mordaunt. And it was her who left with the smoking gun.
A four-minute takedown of Rayner’s claims – which implicated the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary and other Cabinet members in allegations of cronyism during the pandemic – left a now-masked Rayner with her tail between her legs. On the thorny issue of procurement, the Conservatives are not quite out of the woods, with an Inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic ongoing. But Mordaunt adequately skewered Rayner’s sloppy efforts to denigrate the government.
“The charge [Rayner] is making is that the people she names are somehow on the take”, Mordaunt began. “That they have been focused not in the last 16 months on saving lives and getting a vaccination program up and running. That they have, unbelievably, entered into politics, made sacrifices… not to serve in public life but to do a mate, or more accurately a Tory mate, or someone they vaguely know, or someone they met in a lift once, or someone they barely know at all, a favour.”
While acknowledging that “the public care about scrutiny, they do”, Mordaunt’s parting shot hit a sore spot for Labour. “What [the public] see through, though, is the performance the Right Honourable Lady has given here today, which is designed to smear decent colleagues and denigrate British business.”
The strategy is “not getting traction with the public”, she added, “because it’s not plausible.”
The speech has gone down well on conservative social media. It was certainly cool and collected. And fundamentally, Mordaunt is right: Labour’s efforts to denounce Tory sleaze simply aren’t cutting through with the public.
Following Labour’s disastrous result in Hartlepool earlier in the month – when Rayner had erroneously claimed that the winning Tory candidate was the wife of a Cayman banker, when actually he was there as a regulator – today’s Commons blitz should signal a change of strategy. This is a government under strain and spending more on the public than any previous peace-time administration.
As The Spectator’s political editor, James Forsyth, commented today, Labour “wants to take on the kind of Cameron-Osborne Tory party, but it’s not there anymore.”
But the investigation into the transparency of government procurement conducted by the National Audit Office last year, which Mordaunt cites as proof the government is in the clear, says a little more than that. It actually concluded that over half the value of contracts awarded by the government had no tender process. So there’s still more digging to do.
That said, Rayner’s effort to raise that classic Tory spectre pitifully backfired today. The government knows it. And, worryingly for Labour, the public doesn’t really care.
And Mordaunt proved once again how lethal she can be when she decides to home in on the target. The question is why isn’t she more high-profile in the Cabinet?
