During her last Tory conference speech, Penny Mordaunt told her audience: ‘If you remember nothing else from what I have said today remember this – stand up and fight.’

This serial Conservative leadership candidate got her way on that at least, for it was the only point from her address that stuck in anyone’s mind.

Mainly that was because she used the phrase, or near-variants, almost 20 times, including in a disastrously over-extended closing crescendo that ran as follows:

‘Stand up and fight. Because when you stand up and fight, the person beside you stands up and fights. And when our party stands up and fights, the nation stands up and fights. And when our nation stands up and fights, other nations stand up and fight.’

By this point you presumed that a world war had probably started over whatever it was we were supposed to be fighting for. That was the moment when Ms Mordaunt’s leadership rivals, past and future, decided she had finally jumped the shark, appropriately enough for a spirited former contestant on the celebrity diving TV show Splash!

But apparently not. For a plot has emerged among panicking Conservative MPs from her own centrist element of the party and among right-wingers too for her to be installed as prime minister in place of Rishi Sunak in some kind of leadership ‘coronation’. Ms Mordaunt of course does coronations very well, having held aloft a mighty sword of state for hours while dressed in a striking Princess Leia Star Wars-style outfit at the enthronement of King Charles III.

Other undeniable attributes of the Portsmouth North MP and Leader of the House are an enviable ability to beat up the SNP in the Commons chamber and ‘great hair’ (copyright all Fleet Street columnists).

Penny Mordaunt is someone who creates an atmosphere of derring do, of patriotic magnificence even. One is put in mind of John Betjeman’s athletic muse Joan Hunter Dunn, ‘furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun’. But this is where her usefulness as a political figure runs out. Beyond the vibes, in the crucial terrain of policies and ideology where the Tories have failed so badly, then so far as anything is to be found at all it is a mushy Blairite progressivism. And the kind of voters the Conservatives have lost to Reform and elsewhere in recent years have had more than enough of that.

No wonder Blair himself endorsed her 2021 book Greater: Britain after the Storm as ‘uplifting and immensely readable’. A major theme of the tome is that globalisation and multiculturalism have ensured that ‘the present is infinitely, unrecognisably, incomprehensibly better than the reality of the past.’

It even contains a condemnation of the rather sweet 1970s sit com It Ain’t Half Hot Mum over its alleged: ‘casual racism, homophobia, white privilege, colonialism, transphobia, bullying, misogyny and sexual harassment.’

These are the social dragons that, in common with many on the opposition benches, she identifies as still most in need of slaying. Roger Scruton she is not.

As one ministerial colleague puts it: ‘You read her book and you realise she would probably be worse than Labour because she would be doing it under a Conservative banner.’

And so did she famously tell the Commons that ‘trans men are men and trans women are women’. According to her erstwhile leadership rival Suella Braverman she even wanted to use the term ‘pregnant person’ rather than woman or mother in government legislation on maternity rights.

Conservative MPs who think the path to renewed popularity runs through openly joining the other side in the culture war – and believe it or not there are plenty of them – at least have a rationale for wanting to see her replace the hapless Sunak. Those purporting to represent any serious thinking on the right should know very much better than that.

Listen to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson discuss the Penny Plot on Coffee House Shots