It’s only been a day since Nadine Dorries announced her resignation as an MP – in a scathing letter released to the Mail on Sunday blasting Rishi Sunak’s premiership. But it seems that the former culture secretary still has plenty of ammunition left over.
Dorries appeared on TalkTV this afternoon to explain why she felt she had to resign now, and to take another pop at the Prime Minister for good measure.
In the interview, she claimed that she had actually told Cabinet Secretary Simon Case last summer that she planned to resign, but that ‘there was a huge amount of pressure not to go’ from her colleagues. She held out this long, she said, because she didn’t want to force the Tories to fight a by-election on her patch that they would likely lose.
In the end, Dorries said she felt like she had to step down because ‘the entire summer Rishi Sunak has been asking me to go’. Accusing Sunak of indulging the growing calls for her to give up her seat, Dorries blasted the prime minister for ‘[whipping] up a public frenzy which has endangered my safety’.
‘I don’t know what Rishi Sunak is doing because it didn’t have to be this way. He has now put the party in the position of having to fight yet another by-election,’ she said. Dorries says she doesn’t have high hopes for the Tories in the upcoming contest, predicting ‘if my seat is lost, it will be the biggest defeat in a by-election in living history’.
Sticking the knife in further, Dorries said colleagues should blame No. 10 and not her for any defeat in Mid Bedfordshire. She said she couldn’t understand why Sunak would choose to force a by-election on the party just as his first anniversary as PM was coming up – rather conveniently side-stepping her own role in forcing the election.
Elsewhere in her interview, Dorries repeated her claim that Rishi Sunak has been presiding over a ‘zombie parliament’. She also criticised Sunak for abandoning many of the policies that had been in motion when he took over, including house building targets and reforms for leaseholders.
Ominously, Dorries declared that there would be ‘more to come’ on the subject of why she didn’t get a peerage.
Rounding up the chat, TalkTV presenter Nick de Bois asked Dorries if she thought the Tories had a chance of winning the next election with Rishi Sunak as leader? ‘No. I don’t think so. I think it’s very, very unlikely.’ Nor would she say if she would vote Tory at the election.
It certainly seems like Dorries isn’t planning to go quietly…
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