Nadine Dorries has finally bowed to pressure from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and her own party and quit as an MP. The former culture secretary has announced – through an interview with the Mail on Sunday – that she will today inform the Chancellor of her intention to take the Chiltern Hundreds, the formal process for quitting, therefore enabling the writ to be moved on September 4th when parliament returns. This means Rishi Sunak faces a potentially bruising by-election test in the autumn as he attempts to shake-up his premiership ahead of an election year.
Rishi Sunak faces a bruising by-election test in the autumn as he attempts to shake-up his premiership ahead of an election year
When Dorries first announced that she planned to quit – over a row about her missing peerage – she gave various reasons for holding off on formally resigning. One was a subject access request – which she says she has now completed but is unable to share the results of. But ‘friends of Dorries’ also briefed that she didn’t want to let Sunak pick a date for the by-election that suited him. Instead, it was suggested that it would likely be more painful for the Tories to drag it out and have a by-election hanging over them until the autumn.
Dorries’s statement certainly makes clear that she doesn’t want to make life easy for Sunak. The Boris Johnson loyalist argues that ‘since you took office a year ago, the country is run by a zombie parliament where nothing meaningful has happened’. She goes on: ‘you have no mandate from the people and the government is adrift. You have squandered the goodwill of the nation, for what?’ She also attacks Sunak’s record in government ‘taking us to the level of the highest tax take since world war two at 75 per cent of GDP’ and says he has ‘completely failed in reducing illegal immigration or delivering on the benefits of Brexit’. Of course one could argue that some of these things were also problems when Johnson was prime minister. However, Dorries clearly sees Sunak as the main problem.
She also suggests that she has no plans to go quietly and mentions the book – The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson – that she is working on. ‘I shall take some comfort from explaining to people exactly how you and your allies achieved this undemocratic upheaval in my book.’
Given Dorries is a known critic of Sunak, her parting shots at the Prime Minister aren’t all that surprising. As for how No. 10 will react, there will be relief that she is finally quitting. Dorries’s refusal to quit has given opposition parties an easy way to attack the Tories. It’s also the case that aides have been bracing themselves for the book to be damaging, and to accuse them of working to oust Johnson well before he resigned.
The more immediate issue for Sunak, however, is the by-election. If the Tories do lose this once safe seat – it has a 24,664 majority – it will cause alarm even though the circumstances of the by-election are very unique. MPs with majorities of around 15,000 will worry it means their seats are on course to be lost in a general election. At a time when Sunak and his team are hoping to reset and turn around the party’s fortunes – with a minor reshuffle, King’s Speech, and conference – it will be a reminder of how difficult that task is.
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