Nadine Dorries was once the Tory blue collar conscience, now she’s just Nad as Hell
Nadine Dorries, once an outspoken and sincere member of the Conservative Party, has now turned her political career into some form of satire, writes Eliot Wilson
It is inevitable and necessary that successful politicians are wired just slightly differently from the rest of humanity. They must have an unshakeable belief that their contribution to any debate is vital, and they must be devoid of what most people would recognise as a sense of shame. Enter the excitable Member for Mid-Bedfordshire, Nadine Dorries.
It is nearly 20 years since Dorries arrived in the House of Commons, a frank, outspoken and obviously sincere social conservative with working-class roots in Liverpool and a lived-out Thatcherite parable of having started as a nurse before moving to the private sector and ending up a director of Bupa after selling her day-care business to them. She was utterly authentic but equally untroubled by self-doubt, and quickly found a niche as the blue-collar conscience of the Conservative Party, ready to speak uncomfortable truth to the modernising leadership of David Cameron and his fellow “posh boys”.
Now her career has reached the oddest of apogees. The most fervently loyal of all the Boris Johnson cultists, Dorries had been widely expected to be given a peerage by the departing prime minister, but her name was rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Committee, allegedly because she had not announced her intention to leave the Commons. One can understand her frustration if Johnson had assured her of the nomination, but equally she should know better than to rely on the promises of a proven habitual liar.
Most of us, in this rather unlikely scenario, would feel embarrassed and a little exposed. One might direct some resentment towards Johnson, and even towards the prime minister who had, after all, to sign off on the list of honours. But in Dorries’s bizarre mental landscape, she is the victim of betrayal by the establishment and of a conspiracy to keep her out of the House of Lords because of her working-class origins. I will let you read that again.
Inevitably, Dorries is the unwitting stooge in this miasma of skulduggery. (That part, at least, is easy to believe.) She claims she was given every reason to think the peerage would be hers, and was told by the government chief whip, Simon Hart (educated at Radley and the Royal Agricultural College; dangerous “posh boy” vibes), only half an hour before it was published that her name was not on the list.
She has form for seeing conspiracies. When she was a member of the Science and Technology Committee in 2007 (she never managed to attend a meeting), it produced a report on abortion law which essentially endorsed the status quo. Dorries, a passionate pro-life campaigner, was unhappy with its conclusions, but particularly concerned by how Ben Goldacre, the academic and science writer, had obtained a piece of evidence submitted to the committee. She demanded an inquiry, insistent that there must be a leak. In fact the evidence had, like almost all evidence to select committees, been published on the committee’s website.
A conspiracy is heart-rending enough. Dorries has said that “This story is about a girl from Liverpool… who had something that was offered to her… removed by two privileged posh boys”. But think of the cost to her! She is “heart-broken”, not, as cynics might suppose, at the loss of a lifetime place in the legislature and a daily allowance of £323, but “for everyone who comes from a background like mine”. After all, do we really live in a meritocracy if a self-assured but often ignorant political brawler cannot use a seat in cabinet for which she was woefully unqualified to make that last step into the House of Lords? No wonder she feels that Downing Street has “bullied” her.
Few are currently possessed of higher dudgeon than Nadine Dorries. Her reaction to understandable but hardly life-ruining disappointment is cartoonish, almost the stuff of satire, but it is really happening. A mediocre politician who rose improbably high on little more than dewy-eyed devotion to the prime minister has bumped against the ermine ceiling and she is furious. There is, I fear, more to come on this story.