A man who bombarded Dame Penny Mordaunt with 17 emails and three phone calls before showing up at her office out-of-hours has been found guilty of stalking her.
Edward Brandt was allegedly ‘fixated’ on the ex-MP for Portsmouth North and vowed in one message to her to ‘go on gently knocking’ on her door to ‘shake her hand’.
Brandt, 61, was found guilty of stalking her, but acquitted of the more serious offence of stalking involving serious alarm or distress following a trial at Southampton Crown Court.
The decision was reached after the jury returned a majority guilty verdict of10 to two.
Dame Penny said in a statement to police that Brandt’s ‘creepy’ behaviour made her ‘fear sexual violence’ and that he remained a ‘real threat’ to her.
‘I have been a parliamentarian for 14 years and during that time, I have had to deal with all kinds of threats and issues’, she said.
‘It’s different from your average citizen, I am quite used to dealing with this and I am quite a robust individual.
‘The difference between this case and even threats to shoot me and my family, they are easier to deal with because that threat is not constantly present, it’s not something you are having to think about every single day when you are leaving your house.
‘I am not a professional, I do not have counselling experience but I have a lot of life experience and dealing with vulnerable people or people who are mentally unwell or strange in another way and I believe this man was a real threat to me and still is.’
The ex-cabinet minister said in court that while Brandt thought he was being ‘chilavrous and gentlemanly’ he was in fact ‘obsessive and creepy’.
Dame Penny served as an MP between 2010 and 2024, holding a number of cabinet positions including a tenure as Leader of the House, during which she played a prominent ceremonial role at the King’s Coronation in 2023.
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Jurors heard that Brandt had further failed to comply with a conditional caution handed to him in April 2024, requiring him to complete a victim awareness course and to not make further contact with Dame Penny.
The professional sailor left Dame Penny two voicemail messages within four days in May 2024.
In one he said: ‘I am going to go on gently knocking at your door in order to shake your hand, I am not giving up.’
Brandt, who has been diagnosed with ADHD and being on the autistic spectrum, said he wanted to ‘congratulate’ Dame Penny and also offer his commiserations for her not be elected as Tory leader and, therefore at the time, prime minister.
The divorced father-of-two, who lives in Lymington, Hampshire, denied trying to cause the former leader of the Commons harm or distress.
He said: ‘I wanted to commiserate with her for not getting the top job in the autumn, I think she would still have been prime minister if she had been.
‘I wanted to congratulate her because she was a reforming leader of the Commons, I wanted to congratulate her on the coronation, chat to her about her time in office, have her sign a copy of her book.’
The former councillor at East Hampshire District Council explained that politics was his passion and that he had met a series of Conservative leaders including Lord David Cameron, Baroness Theresa May, Lord William Hague and Sir John Major.
‘It was entirely political and entirely harmless’, he added.
But his repeated advances went unacknowledged by Dame Penny’s office, which was forced to increase its security including by installing a panic button, the court heard.
The former MP’s office manager Gemma Fleetwood said that the experience had made the Conservative politician ‘more guarded’ and anxious about attending public engagements.
But Brandt denied his messages contained any content of a sexual nature and suggested that the former cabinet minister had ‘flattered herself’.
‘I was so upset how she unbelievably misunderstood me, I wanted to set the record straight, I wanted to clear the air’, he told the court.
He is due to be sentenced at a later date.
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