Who is Penny Mordaunt, the ex-magician’s assistant looking to conjure up victory in PM race?

Penny Mordaunt, the Commons leader and a former magician’s assistant, will be looking to conjure up the necessary support and pull victory out of a hat in her second bid to become prime minister.

Ms Mordaunt, who has earned a reputation as a competent performer at the despatch box, has said she would “keep calm and carry on” and urged others to do the same after Liz Truss’s resignation.

Popular with Tory activists, she has long nurtured prime ministerial ambitions, fellow MPs claim, relentlessly working the “rubber chicken circuit” of charity dinners and party events to court the grassroots since being elected to her Portsmouth North seat in 2010.

Ms Mordaunt, who has held cabinet posts, including defence secretary, ran to replace Boris Johnson in the first Conservative leadership race with the pithy slogan PM 4 PM.

During that campaign, the Royal Navy reservist, said leadership “needs to become a little less about the leader and a lot more about the ship”.

She came third, narrowly missing out on a place in the head-to-head stage, in which she backed Ms Truss over Rishi Sunak.

Named after the Navy cruiser HMS Penelope

Although she has previously faced accusations about her lack of profile outside politics, this changed after the Queen’s death when as Lord President of the Council she played a central role in proceedings in which Charles was proclaimed King.

Born in Torquay in March 1973, Ms Mordaunt’s history with the Armed Forces goes back to day one – when she says she was named after the Navy cruiser HMS Penelope.

Her father John served in the Parachute Regiment before retraining as a teacher and youth worker, and her mother Jennifer worked as a special needs teacher.

She grew up in Hampshire with her twin brother James and younger brother Edward.

When she was 15 her mother died of breast cancer and she became her younger brother’s primary carer until her father remarried when she was 18.

On leaving home, she went to Romania for a gap year during which she worked in orphanages and hospitals after the 1989 revolution that toppled the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

Crediting those experiences with wanting to go into politics, she returned to the UK to study philosophy at the University of Reading, where she became president of the students’ union.

To fund her studies, she worked in a Johnson & Johnson factory and as a magician’s assistant to the president of the Portsmouth Magical Society and British Ring of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

Worked on presidential campaign

She subsequently worked on George W Bush’s presidential campaigns and was a Conservative party staffer during William Hague’s leadership before branching out into the charity sector.

Winning the Portsmouth North constituency from Labour in 2010, one of her first claims to fame was an appearance on Tom Daley’s reality TV diving show Splash in 2014.

Told by judges she had the “elegance and drive of a paving slab” and criticised by her Labour rivals for not focusing on her day job, she claimed she did it so she could donate most of her £10,000 fee to saving a lido in her constituency.

She also raised eyebrows for a Commons speech in which she squeezed in repeated references to a rude word in a speech about poultry welfare – said to be part of a military bet – leading to accusations of “trivialising parliament”.

As a minister for local government, she caused further controversy when she got into a row with the Fire Brigades Union, which claimed she had “misled MPs” over assurances that firefighters would not have their pensions reduced if they failed fitness tests.

The dispute resulted in strike action.

A prominent Brexiteer, during the 2016 EU referendum campaign she made headlines for falsely claiming during an interview that the UK would not be able to stop Turkey from becoming a member of the bloc.

In 2017 when Priti Patel was forced to resign as international development secretary over undeclared meetings with Israeli officials, Ms Mordaunt replaced her.

She added women and equalities minister to her brief in 2018.

That year she was applauded in the Commons for being the first MP to ever use sign language at the despatch box.

She made history again in 2019 when Theresa May made her the UK’s first-ever female defence secretary.

But she only served for 85 days before Boris Johnson punished her for backing his rival Jeremy Hunt in the Tory leadership contest and demoted her.

Last year she published a book outlining her hopes for post-Brexit Britain.

Ms Mordaunt said it was only through writing it that she realised she was dyslexic and was formally diagnosed.

Trans rights criticism

She has also come under scrutiny over her record on trans rights and self-identification, with critics accusing her of being “too woke”.

While serving as women and equalities minister, she publicly stated that “trans women are women and trans men are men”.

She also came under fire for opting to replace the words “woman” and “mother” with “person” in maternity leave legislation.

‘I am biologically a woman’

However, she had also faced claims she has abandoned her support of the trans community for the sake of her political career.

At her previous campaign launch she said: “I am a woman, I am biologically a woman.

“And I can tell you that if you have been in the Royal Navy and competed against men, you understand the biological difference between men and women.”

During the bitter leadership contest, Ms Mordaunt had doubt cast on her ministerial commitment by her own boss.

She later joked she was “amazed” to be back at the Commons despatch box given her “reported work ethic”.

A member of the British Astronomical Association, she has four Burmese cats.

She will now be looking to magic a win in her second tilt at the leadership and ensure her campaign does not end up a vanishing act.