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:-

Good on her, I thought – if only we had more servicemen and women in the Commons. Then I thought no more. But the Mail on Sunday did more digging (i.e., they looked up the passage of Hansard that she directed everyone to) and the result is a thunderous front page (below) revealing her ‘lewd’ stunt and that she “duped” John Bercow into taking “copious notes”.

Now, here’s the question: how far should we condemn poor old Penny for this? The Mail on Sunday editorial has this to say:-

It is tempting to laugh off her silly speech on poultry welfare, apparently made for a bet, as a harmless jest. Yet it would be wrong. We have to take Parliament seriously, for in the end it is the heart of our constitution.

Yes, but without a bit of humour and levity where would Parliament be? And can we imagine how mind-numbingly dull the place would be without the likes of Penny Mordaunt? If she was a banker who did this as a bet to her fellow directors, she might deserve some criticism. But as she did this for fellow officers in the Royal Navy (or a ‘lewd stunt to please sailor pals’, as the Mail on Sunday puts it). Her ‘stunt’ ought to be seen as a form of national service.

The Mail on Sunday explains how it confronted her with evidence of, erm, her own speech…

But Ms Mourdant, 41, remained apparently unconcerned saying: ‘If I have offended anyone I’m very sorry. Feel free to beat me up over it.”

Unconcerned! If she was ‘concerned’ about this harmless gag then would she have shared her secret in the Savoy Hotel to an audience full of ministers, MPs, political writers, editors and peers? I suspect that Penny sees a bigger picture. Right now, Parliament is increasingly held in contempt – the word ‘Westminster’ is starting to be spat out in Britain, in the same way that the word ‘Washington’ is in America. The remedy is to have vivid, engaging characters like Penny Mordaunt – capable of having a laugh while making serious points.

I suspect that even the Mail on Sunday doesn’t think her stunt was outrageous. I suspect that they put it on the front page because they thought it was damn funny – and knew it would brighten up their readers’ day. The mock outrage is just a way of sharing her very good joke.

All the more reason to say: thank heavens for Penny.

PS When our MPs pull off a stunt like the one below, I’ll be impressed.