After waiting for months, Nadine Dorries has today served her resignation – as several MPs have done recently. But, enraged by Rishi Sunak’s refusal to put her in the House of Lords, she is also triggering a by-election which the Tories are highly likely to lose. In her letter, released in time for the Sunday newspapers, she makes some fair criticisms of Sunak. But the crux of it borders on delusional: a claim that Boris Johnson was forced out of office, even “assassinated“, by a small cabal of Sunak allies.
I was never wild about the idea of defenestrating Johnson. Sunak’s assessment that the Tory poll lead would soon recover was (to put it mildly) optimistic. But it wasn’t Sunak that brought Boris down. Sajid Javid was the first to resign that day, and so many ministers followed that Johnson was simply unable to find enough Tories willing to serve in his government. We ended up with an Education Secretary for two days, and a Chancellor who announced his resignation the day after he was appointed: it was a full-bore meltdown. A rare example of a PM literally unable to govern because his party was in collective rebellion. The idea of a Sunakite cabal orchestrating it all is imaginary: Dorries needs to blame every one of her colleagues who refused to serve in Johnson’s government. And they did so because they could not take any more of the sheer disorder.
Dorries contributed to that disorder, occupying a high rank in the court of Tory chaos. She complains about Tory MPs deposing Prime Ministers as if it were a great violation of democratic principle. This would be easier to take from her had she not added her signature to those who sought to depose Theresa May and David Cameron. When Johnson put her in the Cabinet, she championed an illiberal Online Safety Bill that would have handed huge censorship powers to big tech. She would have harmed diversity in the media by selling Channel Four in a market where homogenising forces would soon make it another Channel Five. Her record in parliament was, to put it mildly, no great advert for her to spend the rest of her life as a legislator in the House of Lords. Sunak was quite right to refuse to buy her silence by sending her there.
For her part, Dorries is right to say in her resignation letter that too little is happening under Sunak now and that the Tories badly lack vision. She’s right to point out the absurdity of him being in No. 10 after losing a leadership election. And that it’s disingenuous of him and his Chancellor to claim credit for an inflation fall that was forecast when Johnson was in office.
But her letter does not mention the real motivation for her resignation: Sunak’s point-blank refusal to ennoble her and succumb to her political blackmail. Her letter today will be part of that threatened revenge. But it’s all rage and ego. No sense of public service, no sense of any duty to the constituents who she pledged to represent until the next election and now seems to have abandoned like a toy she is no longer interested in. As if they were a stepping stone to the Lords and, having failed in this purpose, she no longer has use of them.
“I was born into poverty and clawed my way out of it to build a new life for me and my family, and then carved out a role in public service,” she said. “A seat in the Lords was recognition of that — and a means of continuing to give back to society.” Yet her definition of public service does not even run to serving the constituents whose votes she sought for the timescale she promised. Not even as an independent MP.
Dorries bangs on about the people vs elite but now behaves like an old Tory gent in a rotten borough. As if Mid Bedfordshire is her fiefdom, to represent or not as she sees fit (she has not spoken in parliament for year). She will now use those constituents as pawns, forcing them into a by-election and enlisting them as extras for her own political vendetta. Or, it now seems, book launch.
So the woman who entered parliament as a former nurse and a blue-collar Conservative now leaves it behaving with more egregious entitlement than any Tory grandee. The vanity is breathtaking and embodies the political arrogance that she affects to despise. She’ll now do her worst – but her behaviour, I suspect, will simply serve to underline how right Sunak was about her all along.
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