Who is Penny Mordaunt?

Apparently few knew until recently, even in Britain. (We are told that some of those polled confused her with Adele--and that such confusion was evident even among her own constituents.)

I personally had to look her up when hearing about her being the first to declare herself in the post-Liz Truss leadership contest--maybe because I was having a "Simpson, eh?" moment, but maybe because I really had never had occasion to hear or read her name. To go by what I found there is ample reason for her obscurity--her record, at least, in spite of over twelve years in Parliament, several years in various Cabinet posts (including Secretary of State for Defence) and much else, not distinguished by significant initiatives, or significant stances, at least not in any very public way. Indeed, the little I did find on her was tabloid stuff--tabloid stuff of the sort all too often seen in the records of heads of government these days, not just in Britain but elsewhere.

Like the outgoing Prime Minister with her talk of cheese imports as a "disgrace" she seems to have made herself ridiculous with a speech about agricultural products (the transcript of which you may read at the web site of the "Mother of Parliaments" itself, this now part of official British history, as well as her principal contribution to British oratory to date).

Like a certain President of another country she is, apparently, a celebrity-obsessed, showbusiness-minded, reality TV show personality who grabbed attention at an early stage of the game by gratuitously inserting what one old dictionary I remember would call "slang term, usually vulgar" for "coitus" into a political speech (the same one about the agricultural products). Also as happened on that occasion the usage of said terms excited a great many small minds in the press, in part because it gave them a rare excuse to use such words in their copy (though, very much unlike in the other case, also because hearing Britain's "sexiest MP" speak a certain synonym for rooster probably appealed to many in . . . well, other ways).

Of such are heads of government made these days--but for the time being the oddsmakers appear to favor instead the "populist" billionaire who even at a less exalted point in his life bragged on camera that he had no working class friends and got his professional start working for Goldman Sachs, in what seems equally a sign of the times.*

* Sunak's personal fortune of some £730 million is not much short of a billion--so close as to make little difference--and as of just last year (with the pound hitting $1.38) would have made him a billionaire in U.S. dollar terms. At any rate his wife and father-in-law are each both safely accounted billionaires--which is more than can be said for many of those more commonly called billionaire (as Jeffrey Epstein was once supposed to be). So I feel comfortable calling Sunak a billionaire here.