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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
National
Dan O'Donoghue

New Tory cabinet member Nadine Dorries 'declares interest' through family link to football history

Liverpool-born Tory minister Nadine Dorries said her great-grandfather was a founding member of Everton Football Club as she declared "an interest" in Parliament.

Ms Dorries, who was promoted in Boris Johnson's reshuffle, used her first Commons appearance as Culture, Media and Sport Secretary to "declare an interest".

She told MPs that she was a Liverpool fan, but that her great-grandfather George Bargery was instrumental in the Toffees' history.

Read more: Boris Johnson orders Tory MPs to ignore Universal Credit cut vote

She said: "Football is central to our national life and this might be a good point to mention my own interest in football, as well as Rugby league, is that my great-grandfather's actually one of the founding members of Everton Football Club - although I am a Liverpool supporter.

"So I declare my interest on day one."

The records show that, as well as a founding member, George Bargery was also the club's goalkeeper.

He was between the sticks when Everton played their first ever competitive game – a Lancashire Senior Cup tie against Great Lever in 1880 and in the 1881/82 season he kept six clean sheets in nine games.

Ms Dorries is best known outside Westminster for her 2012 appearance on ITV's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.

The 64-year-old, who started out as a nurse before entering politics in 2000, is also an author.

Her promotion to the Culture brief has raised eyebrows in some quarters, due to her previous comments about “left-wing snowflakes” influencing public debate.

In 2017, she tweeted: “Left wing snowflakes are killing comedy, tearing down historic statues, removing books from universities, dumbing down panto, removing Christ from Christmas and suppressing free speech. Sadly, it must be true, history does repeat itself. It will be music next.”

And last year she turned her attention to the BBC describing it as favouring “strident, very left wing, often hypocritical and frequently patronising views that turn people away”.

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