Penny Mordaunt may have been the MP for Portsmouth North for 12 years, and could perhaps be the next prime minister, but some of her constituents were perplexed when hearing her name on Friday. “Who’s she? I don’t know nothing about her,” said James McLeish, who added he would not recognise her if she passed him on the street. “Never seen her, don’t even know what she stands for.” McLeish’s bemusement came hours before Mordaunt formally announced she was standing to replace Liz Truss – stealing a march on her presumed rivals Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson.
Speaking in Cosham High Street, which runs through the centre of a suburb to the north of the port city, McLeish, 82, had a much clearer view on Truss’s resignation after a disastrous 45 days in office. “It’s about bloody time,” he said. “She was useless, absolutely useless. All she was interested in was herself, nobody else. It’s shocking.” Tom Wilson, 27, a barber on the high street, agreed that Truss’s resignation could not have come soon enough. “I definitely expected her to resign, I thought she would be ousted before she resigned, honestly,” he said. “I didn’t think she would hang in there for as long as she did.”
He added: “It seems to have become more about who can stay in power, as opposed to actually caring about what their policies are or actually implementing anything. When they U-turned on basically everything, I thought: ‘Well yeah, she can’t stay now.’” McLeish said he felt Johnson was the tonic to the current Tory problems. “I want him back because we know him,” McLeish said. “Alright, he’s made mistakes, like everybody. But he’s admitted to them. And the general public know him, and know what he’s like and what he stands for.” Wilson would begrudgingly support Sunak. “I don’t love any of them, I probably think that if I absolutely had to pick someone it would be Rishi Sunak,” he said. “I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but he does actually seem to believe in what he says and wants to follow through on it.” Despair at Truss’s reign did not dissipate in North End, a neighbourhood in the middle of Portsea Island around 2 miles south of Cosham, a stone’s throw from the birthplace of the former prime minister James Callaghan and one of Britain’s most revered author, Charles Dickens.
“She should never have been put in that position,” Christine Lyon-Young, a 63-year-old music teacher, said of Truss. “As a fellow woman, I feel very sorry for her on a personal level. But as a politician I think she absolutely has let everybody down. “I don’t think she was ever up for it, right from the start. She possibly was the best of a bad bunch, but then having said that, I think Rishi Sunak must be laughing in his cornflakes.” Chloe Doswell, a 22-year-old student nurse, said she believed Johnson was the best person to take over as prime minister. “I don’t think it’s a terrible idea; I think it might be the best of a bad bunch.”
“He actually did things and saw things through,” she said. “I do feel sorry for him for having to deal with Covid because no one knew that was going to happen.” Linda Wiley, 69, admitted she was surprised Truss won the leadership contest over the summer, though her verdict on her performance as prime minister was certain. “She’s not been very good at all,” Wiley said. “The country has suffered because of her and I think the country is currently a laughing stock.”
Despite liking Mordaunt, Wiley said she did not think she had what it took to succeed Truss, and would rather see Sunak as leader. “I do like her, and I like what she stands for, but I don’t think she has the oomph to become the prime minister.”