Before she was known as “Dosser Dorries”, the now former MP advertised her delight in relocating to “idyllic” Mid Bedfordshire, where she’d just been elected. People moved there, “as I have, because they wanted to wake up to the sound of birdsong rather than the incessant hum of traffic”. Vowing to “base everything I do on integrity”, she concluded her maiden speech in 2005: “I will always do my best for the people of Mid Bedfordshire, the place that I now call home.”
It was a strange thing for her to call Mid Bedfordshire, because Nadine Dorries really lived in Stratford-on-Avon. Even when, after two years, she finally submitted to the call of birdsong, she maintained another home in Stratford, or thereabouts, a complicated arrangement which the parliamentary commissioner for standards took some time to unravel after questions were asked about which property was benefiting from parliamentary allowances. It did not help that she had pretended to live in Mid Bedfordshire when her main home was elsewhere. “It was unrealistic of Ms Dorries,” John Lyon concluded in 2010, “to expect to keep secret the general location of her main home.”
Shameless to a degree we can now recognise as characteristic, Dorries explained her words were sometimes, for professional reasons, untrue. “My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.” Had her actual location been known, her opponents “would be able to exaggerate that to good effect”.
However delicious it was to watch Dorries embarrass her colleagues until it suited her to stop, it demonstrates, like the expenses scandal, how well the current system can protect the least deserving of MPs. After the party leadership was careless enough not to make permanent her suspension – for an unauthorised appearance on I’m a Celebrity… – her Tory-supporting constituents were unable to insist on either a replacement or reform. A month after readmission, an unrepentant Dorries said how much she’d like to do Strictly. The combination of arrogance, greed, entitlement and disrespect for public office that has been torturing her party was indulged by it, when not actively rewarded, for years.
As complex as it is to calibrate how much Dorries can take credit for normalising extreme MP moonlighting, when, among others, Geoffrey Cox, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson have also done so much, her achievement in juggling political duties with the relentless production of novels, a third career on TalkTV and a fourth one as a Daily Mail columnist, looks almost uniquely harsh on affected constituents. Her website features, in the absence of surgery dates and political content, promotions of her TV slots and books. Add to that her all-purpose put-down (her own money being proletarian) of “posh boys”, her employment on the public payroll of two daughters, her loyalty to the groper and wife-beater Stanley Johnson and a sideline in aggressive and misleading tweets, and you can almost understand Dorries’s incredulity on being finally, after all that, thwarted. At the point she was denied her peerage, she hadn’t even been condemned by the privileges committee for her part in an “unprecedented and coordinated” attack on its members!
Not that we should overlook some valiant pockets of parliamentary resistance. In successive reports, investigators expressed “regret”, “disappointment” and “concern” in relation to behaviours that, cumulatively, would have been fatal in other professions.
Dorries seems early to have acquired the habit of meeting criticism with denial, abuse, even threats; of only apologising when absolutely forced to. Questioned about expenses, she might respond: “Well, I’m going to go after them” (£3,000 in travel expenses was repaid). After losing the whip, in 2013, she called the suspension ridiculous. “My constituents absolutely love it.” Poetic licence, probably. Polling by Lord Ashcroft showed a majority of her constituents disapproved of her jungle appearance. But they were expected to keep her.
As her extramural career took off, Dorries took time to threaten the privileges committee investigating her non-declaration of freelance payments for the TV work and writing career inadvertently gifted her by the inhabitants of Mid Bedfordshire. She replied to its requests for information with “your report amounts to a witch hunt” and threats of legal action. “Accusations of the sort made by Ms Dorries are unacceptable,” the committee said. She had to apologise for not reporting £142,000.
Even after that, and many more book advances, Dorries would be re-elected and promoted, finally to secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport. One colleague, the allegedly capable Ben Wallace, advised sceptics that her most profitable sideline actually made Dorries perfect for this honour. “She produces culture that people buy and actually want to see, rather than some of the more crackpot schemes we’ve seen being funded.” Until AI can produce lines like “Her nostrils retrieved the memory of the green fields”, she certainly has something special.
Maybe this same creativity accounted for an episode in which Dorries’s nostrils somehow retrieved an unlikely and unsubstantiated memory about a Channel 4 production. After an inquiry, the DCMS parliamentary committee was “concerned” that she had taken the opportunity, “under the protection of privilege, to traduce the reputation of Channel 4”. Dorries: “I’d like to know how much public money was spent on what is a crock of total nonsense.” Less, probably, than it has spent on Nadine Dorries MP, whose last spoken contribution was in July 2022.
She has been busy with a book about Boris Johnson, due next month and expected to exact further revenge. Colleagues should remind themselves of her recorded reliance on poetic licence.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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