Penny Mordaunt's campaign mocked for failing at basic maths

Penny Mordaunt is scrambling to stay in the race to become the next Prime Minister – a job with an intimidating intray including, most notably, to save Britain’s economy.

Given the UK’s looming financial crisis, you’d hope the new PM would have a decent grasp of numbers, but the Mordaunt camp doesn’t seem too fussed with all that.

Indeed, she and her team are clearly so preoccupied with portraying the Tory leadership hopeful as a safe and “fresh” pair of hands, that they’ve failed to do basic addition when vaunting the results of a new poll.

With just hours to go to secure the 100 nominations needed to remain in the competition, the Leader of the House of Commons tweeted the results of a vague survey which allegedly found her to be the “most trusted for a fresh start”.

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Her post came complete with a graph showing she had gained 57 per cent of respondents’ support compared with 44 per cent for rival Rishi Sunak.

Look at those figures again: 57 to 44… Does that make 100? No. And neither, by the looks of things, will Mordaunt.

Inevitably, Twitter was quick to seize on the mathematical error, and the response has been sufficiently crushing:

Sunak is the firm frontrunner to be the next Prime Minister after Boris Johnson ended his comeback bid via a self-aggrandising statement published on Sunday evening.

The former Chancellor swiftly hit the threshold of 100 nominations from Conservative colleagues ahead of the deadline of 2pm on Monday before commanding the public support of about half the parliamentary party.

Mordaunt appears far behind but allies insist they are “confident” she will hit the target, which would see the Commons Leader face off against Sunak in an online ballot of Tory party members.

But, if she fails, “Dishi Rishi” will effectively receive a coronation from Conservative MPs and quickly succeed Liz Truss in Number 10 – seven weeks after he lost out to her in the last contest.

The new PM could be in place as soon as Monday if the contest doesn't progress further, Government sources have said.

Meanwhile, we're still trying to work out why anyone would want the job, quite frankly.

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