Meet Right-Wing Psychopath Nadine Dorries
Nadine Dorries is kind of Marjorie Traitor Greene figure in U.K. politics, an outspoken fringe crackpot and foul-mouthed bully always fighting with her colleagues and looking for self-promoting headlines. Notorious for grossly over-charging on reimbursement expenses and for giving family members high salary jobs they were unqualified to hold and didn’t even show up for, when questioned about it by Ben Glaze, deputy political editor of the Daily Mirror, she tweeted: “Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor... using your own front teeth. Do you get that?” Does that sound like our Little Margie or what!
A Conservative ally of Boris Johnson, who appointed her to his cabinet, she quit Parliament after he did— and when she wasn’t granted a peerage. She’s now sniping at the Conservatives from the peanut gallery. Her latest shit-show has her predicting that the neo-fascist Reform UK will annihilate the Conservatives in the July 4 elections. “What we’re seeing right now is possibly the annihilation of the Conservative Party. It’s probably going to disappear and, you know, certainly if Reform take over, given tactical voting which is taking place already in many constituencies and given the uprising in Reform’s votes and support since Nigel Farage decided he would stand as leader, I think you could see the disappearance of the Conservative Party.”
That’s not going to happen. Reform will be very lucky to win half a dozen seats— their support is spread out nationally, not concentrated in more than a couple of constituencies— and as badly as the Conservatives are doing in the polling, they’ll still likely wind up with at least 100 seats in the 650-member Parliament.
The xenophobic, anti-Choice, anti-LGBTQ Dorries isn’t standing for one but I expect her to run as a Reform candidate at some point in the future. First elected in 2005, she had already outraged her Conservative colleagues in 2013 by suggesting they run joint candidates with the pre-Reform fascist party, UKIP, which she had been threatening to join when she was suspended by the Conservatives over one of her publicity hound stunts.
She repeatedly called for the head of the Conservative Party to resign for not being right-wing enough on the issues that mattered to her, like Brexit. She was the first member of Parliament diagnosed with COVID. In 2020, Johnson appointed her Minister of Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health, causing no end of laughter on both sides of the aisle. When the laughter became serious because of her incompetence in handling the pandemic, she was made Secretary of Digital Media, Culture and Sport. Her resignation as a member of Parliament was messy and in the headlines for weeks as she dithered and caused one scandal after another, pissed off that she was not named a Lady. Months after announcing she was quitting, she finally sent newly-elected Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a bitter and whiny resignation letter that she eagerly leaked to the press:
Long before my resignation announcement, in July 2022, I had advised the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, of my intention to step down. Senior figures in the party, close allies of yours, have continued to this day to implore me to wait until the next general election rather than inflict yet another damaging by-election on the party at a time when we are consistently twenty points behind in the polls.
Having witnessed first-hand, as Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were taken down, I decided that the British people had a right to know what was happening in their name. Why is it that we have had five Conservative prime ministers since 2010, with not one of the previous four having left office as the result of losing a general election? That is a democratic deficit which the mother of parliaments should be deeply ashamed of and which, as you and I know, is the result of the machinations of a small group of individuals embedded deep at the centre of the party and Downing Street.
To start with, my investigations focused on the political assassination of Boris Johnson, but as I spoke to more and more people— and I have spoken to a lot of people, from ex-prime ministers, cabinet ministers both ex and current through all levels of government and Westminster and even journalists— a dark story emerged which grew ever more disturbing with each person I spoke to.
It became clear to me as I worked that remaining as a back bencher was incompatible with publishing a book which exposes how the democratic process at the heart of our party has been corrupted. As I uncovered this alarming situation I knew, such were the forces ranged against me, that I was grateful to retain my parliamentary privilege until today. And, as you also know Prime Minister, those forces are today the most powerful figures in the land. The onslaught against me even included the bizarre spectacle of the Cabinet Secretary claiming (without evidence) to a select committee that he had reported me to the Whips and Speakers office (not only have neither office been able to confirm this was true, but they have no power to act, as he well knows). It is surely as clear a breach of Civil Service impartiality as you could wish to see.
But worst of all has been the spectacle of a prime minister demeaning his office by opening the gates to whip up a public frenzy against one of his own MPs. You failed to mention in your public comments that there could be no writ moved for a by-election over summer. And that the earliest any by-election could take place is at the end of September. The clearly orchestrated and almost daily personal attacks demonstrates the pitifully low level your Government has descended to.
It is a modus operandi established by your allies which has targeted Boris Johnson, transferred to Liz Truss and now moved on to me. But I have not been a prime minister. I do not have security or protection. Attacks from people, led by you, declared open season on myself and the past weeks have resulted in the police having to visit my home and contact me on a number of occasions due to threats to my person.
Since you took office a year ago, the country is run by a zombie Parliament where nothing meaningful has happened. What exactly has been done or have you achieved? You hold the office of prime minister unelected, without a single vote, not even from your own MPs. You have no mandate from the people and the government is adrift. You have squandered the goodwill of the nation, for what?
And what a difference it is now since 2019, when Boris Johnson won an eighty-seat majority and a greater percentage of the vote share than Tony Blair in the Labour landslide victory of 1997. We were a mere five points behind on the day he was removed from office. Since you became prime minister, his manifesto has been completely abandoned. We cannot simply disregard the democratic choice of the electorate, remove both the prime minister and the manifesto commitments they voted for and then expect to return to the people in the hope that they will continue to unquestioningly support us. They have agency, they will use it.
Levelling up has been discarded and with it, those deprived communities it sought to serve. Social care, ready to be launched, abandoned along with the hope of all of those who care for the elderly and the vulnerable. The Online Safety Bill has been watered down. BBC funding reform, the clock run down. The Mental Health Act, timed out. Defence spending, reduced. Our commitment to net zero, animal welfare and the green issues so relevant to the planet and voters under 40, squandered. As Lord Goldsmith wrote in his own resignation letter, because you simply do not care about the environment or the natural world. What exactly is it you do stand for?
You have increased Corporation tax to 25%, taking us to the level of the highest tax take since World War Two at 75% of GDP, and you have completely failed in reducing illegal immigration or delivering on the benefits of Brexit. The bonfire of EU legislation, swerved. The Windsor framework agreement, a dead duck, brought into existence by shady promises of future preferment with grubby rewards and potential gongs to MPs. Stormont is still not sitting.
Disregarding your own chancellor, last week you took credit for reducing inflation, citing your “plan.” There has been no budget, no new fiscal measures, no debate, there is no plan. Such statements take the British public for fools. The decline in the price of commodities such as oil and gas, the eased pressure on the supply of wheat and the increase in interest rates by the Bank of England are what has taken the heat out of the economy and reduced inflation. For you to personally claim credit for this was disingenuous at the very least.
It is a fact that there is no affection for Keir Starmer out on the doorstep. He does not have the winning X factor qualities of a Thatcher, a Blair, or a Boris Johnson, and sadly, prime minister, neither do you. Your actions have left some 200 or more of my MP colleagues to face an electoral tsunami and the loss of their livelihoods, because in your impatience to become prime minister you put your personal ambition above the stability of the country and our economy. Bewildered, we look in vain for the grand political vision for the people of this great country to hold on to, that would make all this disruption and subsequent inertia worthwhile, and we find absolutely nothing.
I shall take some comfort from explaining to people exactly how you and your allies achieved this undemocratic upheaval in my book. I am a proud working-class Conservative which is why the Levelling Up agenda was so important to me. I know personally how effective a strong and helping hand can be to lift someone out of poverty and how vision, hope and opportunity can change lives. You have abandoned the fundamental principles of Conservatism. History will not judge you kindly.
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