It’s not often you see Tory MPs celebrating anything, but on Monday a bunch of them were packed into an office high in Portcullis House to toast the rehabilitation of Nadine Dorries. Last autumn the Mid-Bedfordshire MP was suspended from the party after appearing on the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! For six months she has been in limbo, unable to call herself a Tory. Last week, she was allowed back into the club. We met in the House of Commons after her bustling ‘Return of the Prodigal Daughter’ reception.
Her fellow Tories, she says, are pleased she’s returned. Every day, she’s accosted by MPs and staffers keen to welcome her back into the fold. ‘I was walking along from the car park to here and MPs were coming up and kissing me,’ she says. ‘It’s just such a lovely feeling.’
The prodigal is back, but she isn’t repentant. In fact, Dorries is insistent that speaking her mind is one of her key selling points. ‘Look, this is who I am,’ she says. ‘Who I am is authentic and I don’t have this filter that filters out everything that’s human or everything that’s funny or emotional or instinctive and what comes out of the other side of the filter is the professional politician. I was born without that filter.’ That honesty makes her popular not just with backbenchers, who tend to be very fond and protective of Dorries, but also with her constituents. She was recently teased over a local supermarket’s PA system about the grubs she’d had to eat on camera in Australia.
Nadine Dorries is a relaxed interviewee. She sits with her bare feet resting on the sofa in her office; she teases her researcher and dives off into little anecdotes about her friends and family.
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