Nadine Dorries is Making Plans for Nigel
In an extract from his book 'Tories: The End of an Error' Russell Jones reminds us of the ludicrously chequered history of Reform UK's latest recruit.
Nadine Dorries is a woman whose entire life seems to be conducted ‘after lunch’.
Since becoming a cabinet minister, she had spent her days strutting around in deluded pride with head held high: a simple enough task, since her head was clearly unburdened by contents. And predictably her ascendency to high office had been driven entirely by ego, it’s just that it wasn’t her ego: it was Boris Johnson’s, who seemingly promoted her for gazing lushly at him during PMQs, her eyes illuminated from within by the dancing light of an idiot’s lantern.
Her first brush with politics set the tone for everything that had happened since: the Hazel Grove constituency had been a top target seat for the Conservatives in 2001, but then Nadine rocked up. The decision to select her as candidate split the local party between those who thought she was a complete moron, and those who knew it for sure.
Within days of being selected she was deselected again, not least because – and it’s hard to believe this, but it’s what reports say – she hadn’t even been able to get the year of her birth right on her application to stand. Yet no sooner had she been deselected than she was reselected again, due to Conservative Central Office applying pressure on the local party. Headquarters felt selecting more female candidates would burnish the party’s reputation, and seemed rather less concerned that one of those candidates being Nadine Dorries would instantly sully it again. By the time her good works were done, the Conservatives had admitted to ‘privately writing off’ their chances of winning Hazel Grove. Dorries had converted an almost-certain electoral victory into a loss by more than 9,000 votes.[iii]
She stood again in Mid Bedfordshire, a seat which had become vacant because the previous Conservative MP, Jonathan Sayeed, had the whip removed when it was discovered he’d been running a dodgy sideline showing wealthy people around parliament in return for money. Dorries was clearly eager to correct her predecessors’ reputation for putting personal enrichment ahead of public responsibility, which is why she attended only two per cent of meetings of the parliamentary committee she was appointed to, while simultaneously attaining a top-ten placement on the list of MPs giving highly-paid jobs to their own family members. Her daughter managed to get a £45,000 job as her office manager, even though she lived 96 miles away from the office she was supposedly managing.
When a journalist enquired into this odd state of affairs, Dorries informed him of her plans to ‘nail your balls to the floor using your own front teeth’. Yet despite her sterling efforts to charm the news media, journalists continued querying Nadine’s finances, and she told the BBC she was the victim of a witch-hunt.
But here’s the thing with witch-hunts. Sometimes they catch a witch.
Dorries – who once said, ‘I never do anything I know to be wrong and I have common sense by the bucketful’ – then abandoned being an MP for a month so she could whizz off to Australia for an appearance on I’m A Celebrity, which she justified by saying it gave her a platform to promote her pro-life views.
It also gave her a platform for collecting £82,000 in appearance fees, and I think we can mark it down as one of her greatest successes, since she was voted off the show in the blink of an eye, failed to mention abortion, and tried to persuade the parliamentary standards committee that she didn’t declare her appearance fee because she’d signed a confidentiality agreement with ITV. When this ploy didn’t work, she threatened to litigate against the commissioner for standards, using the bold legal argument that she didn’t like those standards, and would like to operate under different ones.
Much like her career, her threat of litigation passed without notice, and Dorries was suspended from the parliamentary Conservative party.
‘I have not had the whip withdrawn’, she said, upon being informed that she had had the whip withdrawn. ‘The whip has temporarily been suspended while I was abroad. And I hope that it will be fully reinstated tomorrow’. It was not reinstated tomorrow, and she had to make a public apology to Parliament for the entire farcical episode.
Yet by 2021 Dorries was the toast of the Tory right, by which I mean she was thick, jammy, and often found face down on the kitchen floor. The jammyness was most apparent in her appointment as culture secretary, an event that cannot be explained away without the use of the word ‘spoof’.
Her first act as minister was to push for the privatisation of Channel 4, because she said it was getting public money. And reality’s first act was to wearily sigh, and explain that that’s not how Channel 4 is funded, something Nadine was forced to discover in real time during a select committee meeting that redefined the boundaries of cringeworthiness. Fortunately she was able to escape from any embarrassment with a turn of phrase that is almost Churchillian in its poise, dignity and eloquence.
‘And so… though it’s… yeah… and that’.
Beautiful. We should put that on our money.
To conclude: public service comes in many forms, and the form chosen by Nadine was to add to the gaiety of the nation, while simultaneously diminishing its dignity. So it brought a tear to many an eye when in February 2023 she announced she was standing down due to what she had the temerity to describe as the Conservative Party’s ‘sheer stupidity’.
Dorries’ beef with the party arose from her Folie à Une over Boris Johnson, who had told her, ‘Nads, stay’, something she was kind enough to report to a nation that seemed to be running out of things to laugh about. So she sat nicely, wagging and panting, while he promised he’d reward her with a nice juicy peerage. What Johnson had failed to inform her was that the House of Lords Appointments Commission had already rejected her as a peer, and he already knew as much.
Dorries was livid, and because every single thought that enters her mind must instantly be shared with the world, like a panda showing off its rare baby, she took to every medium available to fulminate noisily about the unfairness of it all. She claimed that ‘posh boy’ Rishi Sunak had blocked her peerage, and that he was ‘not telling the truth’, unlike her famously honest, non-posh old Etonian hero, Boris Johnson.
Three months after she said she’d resign with immediate effect, she still hadn’t got around to it, and had transformed once again into a gigantic political embarrassment. She hadn’t spoken in parliament for over a year, although you couldn’t shut her up in other locations. Her local council urged her to quit in a strongly worded letter.
Her parliamentary colleagues couldn’t decide whether to embrace her, reject her, or drop her off at a no-kill animal shelter. Even Rishi Sunak said she wasn’t doing an MP’s job properly, and Tory backbenchers had begun moves to force her from her seat if she didn’t turn up. They’d just give her another six months and then, ooh, just you watch.
There are as many reasons for Nadine Dorries to be denied a lifetime of unelected political power as there are stars in the sky, not least that she’d just spent years standing in noisy and mildly befuddled opposition to unelected political power. ‘I for one will be lobbying for a bill to massively reduce the Lords in size’, she tweeted in 2018, arguing for ‘positions to be elected’. But the official reason given for denying her a peerage was that she hadn’t agreed to stop being an MP within the requisite six-month timeframe. When this was eventually, and presumably very slowly, explained to Dorries, she threw a record-breaking conniption fit and finally, only 81 days after she’d promised to resign with immediate effect, she stood down as an MP in August 2023.
Tories: The End of an Error is published by Byline Books.
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Magnificent as always. Brings a dose of cheer in dismal times