Penny Mordaunt video: Tory leadership campaign Twitter video explained - and why was Jonnie Peacock removed?

Penny Mordaunt's candidacy to become the next Conservative leader got off to a shaky start, with her launch video hastily modified to exclude numerous identifiable people, including athlete Jonnie Peacock.

On Sunday (10 July) morning, the foreign trade minister declared her candidacy for Prime Minister, saying the UK's leadership "needs to become a little less about the leader and a lot more about the ship."

She, like other candidates who have thrown their hat into the race, released what she presumably thought was a slickly edited video to announce her running.

But why did the video attract controversy, and what else has been removed from it?

Here is everything you need to know about it.

What was in the video?

Mordaunt’s original campaign video featured two seconds of footage of Jonnie Peacock competing in the Paralympics in London in 2012.

Peacock responded to Mordaunt on Twitter, writing: “I officially request to be removed from this video…. Anything but blue please.”

Perhaps even more errouneously, the clip also included a a shot of Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter accused of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Mordaunt tweeted an updated version of the video just over five hours later; a plane flying over the camera replaced the Peacock clips.

What else was changed?

Several additional aspects of her first campaign film were changed in the revised edition of the clip.

A clearly identifiable smiling police officer was substituted with a clip of a tractor driving through a field.

Cricketer Jonny Bairstow appeared in the first video but was replaced by the Angel Of The North sculpture in the second.

A shot of the Welsh football team celebrating its victory over Ukraine in June immediately followed Bairstow in the original film. This was also omitted from the second video.

A clip showing soldiers dressed in a uniform unrelated to the British military services was also included in the initial video, but it was replaced with footage of Westminster.

And video featuring Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, the British co-developer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, was replaced with more generic footage of healthcare workers.

Who is Penny Mordaunt?

Penny Mourdant is a Conservative politician who has served as the MP for Portsmouth North since 2010.

She currently serves in the Home Office as the Postmaster General, a ministerial position, and previously served in PM Theresa May’s Cabinet as International Development Secretary from 2017 to 2019, and Defence Secretary in 2019.

She first stood as an MP in the 2005 general election, losing out to a Labour candidate. However, she stood again in 2010 and won.

Mordaunt was also a key figure in the Leave campaign in 2016 and throughout the Brexit negotiations she was the UK alternate co-chair of the EU Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee.

Mordaunt is viewed as an outside candidate for taking over as Prime Minister, but she is tipped to attract support.

The Portsmouth North MP’s recent work has included leading efforts to secure economic pacts with American states and she is considered a strong speaker and on top of her brief in her Commons appearances.