Tory MP Penny Mourdant has caused a stir in Sunday’s papers over her confession at our Parliamentarian of the Year awards that she said ‘cock’ in Parliament as a bet with her colleagues in the Royal Navy, where she serves as a reservist.
As winner of our Speech of the Year award, Mourdant clearly has a way with words. Here are her top five gags (so far):
1. Caring for your kit in the field
One of the highlights of her award-winning Loyal Speech earlier this year was a gag about her Royal Navy training:
‘I have benefited from some excellent training by the Royal Navy but on one occasion I felt it was not as bespoke as it might have been. Fascinating through it was, I felt that he lecture and demonstration on how to care for your penis and testicles in the field failed to appreciate that some of us attending had been issued with the incorrect kit.’
2. Cook-a-hook about animal welfare
As the result of a bet with her Navy colleagues, Mordaunt used variations on the word ‘cock’ during a speech on animal welfare in the House of Commons. Here are the select quotes from the speech were she used the offending word:
‘As some supermarkets seem to have substituted easter eggs, fluffy chicks and chocolate bunnies for tinsel and crackers cockcrow on the seventh of January’
‘The cause of hen and cock welfare is one raised with me by many of my constituents’
‘The British Hen Welfare Trust should be cock-a-hoop about its successful record in 2005 of rehoming 360,000 laying hens of pensionable age’
‘In ‘The Good Life’ idyll, one imagines several hens and a single proud cockerel but one strutting coxcomb will lead to many chicks and what is to become of the male contingent with not a layer among them’
‘I encourage people to consider homes for hens but to think carefully about a coop for a cockerel.’
‘When we eventually head into spring, let us have no cock-ups on hen welfare.’

3. Thelma and Louise of Parliament
In her Loyal Address, Mourdaunt hit back at remarks from fellow Conservative MP Sir Edward Leigh that it was time to end the coalition:
‘The right honourable member for Gainsborough is concerned about the consequence of the coalition running its full course. He might see as the Thelma and Louise of the Parliamentary session: driving at top speed to the Grand Canyon of electoral defeat. Let me reassure him that this will not be the case because unlike a 1966 Thunderbird, this coalition is right hand drive.’

4. Blood pressure concerns
Mordaunt explained her reasoning for not delivering the Loyal Address in her navy uniform, as one of her predecessors Sir Hedworth Meux once did:
‘In 1917, he seconded the Loyal Address in his number 1b uniform, and in the course of his remarks, advised that the naval service was better praised by an outsider than one who belongs to it. I, in contrast, am not in my uniform. Alas, Chamber protocol and concerns for the blood pressure of my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) prevent it. As hon. Members who have come within earshot of me during the past four years will know, I am very happy to praise the senior service from within.’

5. I’d like to thank male genitalia… 
As well as admitting to the bet, Mordaunt’s also acknowledge that the real reason she won an award was not thanks to long working hours:
‘I feel a bit of a fraud actually because let’s face it, the reason I won this was not because of the hours I put in or the carefully crafted speech, it’s because I referred to male genitalia during the course of it. That was not the first time I’ve done that on the floor of the House…’
Tags: House of Commons, Parliamentarian of the Year, Penny Mordaunt, UK politics