Liz Truss channelled Peter Mandelson at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday when she repeatedly insisted she was “a fighter not a quitter”.
Mandelson, a key figure in the creation of New Labour alongside Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, used the phrase in Hartlepool on the night of the 2001 general election result, when he was returned as an MP after his second resignation from cabinet – this time after being accused of helping an Indian billionaire get a British passport.
While the Tory leader may have bought herself a little more time by using the line, her apparent inspiration for it was less than impressed.
“At least I said it with some panache,” the man once known in the corridors of Westminster as “the prince of darkness” told the FT.
Variations of the phrase have littered political obituaries in the past, not least those of Richard Nixon and Iain Duncan Smith, who insisted at different times that they were not quitters. Theresa May and David Cameron also attempted to underline their fighting credentials as they reached the end of the line.
But Truss’s version appears to most closely resemble the emotionally charged performance given by Mandelson after he had faced a challenge to his seat from Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour party.
In his victory speech, he said: “It was said that I was facing political oblivion, my career in tatters, apparently never to be part of the political living again.
“Well, they underestimated Hartlepool and they underestimated me because I am a fighter and not a quitter.”
Mandelson was later cleared by an inquiry of any impropriety and went on to have third political life after leaving the Hartlepool seat he had held since 1992, going on in 2004 to be appointed as EU trade commissioner.
