The meaning of Nadine Dorries

I was in the back of a cab with Nadine Dorries once. It was after some event where politicians and the press meet up to propagate their unhealthy relationships with one another at someone else’s expense, probably yours. I can’t remember exactly what it was. All I remember is this apparently perpetually furious woman ranting at me, a whirling bleached-blonde cloud of vituperation and contumely, with the vestigial tail of a scouse accent — like the bastard offspring of a semi-articulate Tasmanian Devil and the late Bessie Braddock MP. Simon Hoggart was with us too and he just sort of merged imperceptibly with the taxi seat and became invisible. He did not engage. I tried turning on the charm, but being quite charmless myself, this did not work. I can’t even remember what she was so cross about; something, everything, everyone. I quite liked her for it, to tell you the truth, this implacable rage.

It is a fury which is rarely kept beneath the surface for very long. Since first being elected in 2005 she has fallen out with everyone there is to fall out with: her party’s leaders, Labour’s women MPs, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the press, the parliamentary standards officers who poked around in her very dubious expenses claims, her sick husband, her boyfriend, the world beyond. In some quarters — one assumes at the top of her party — she is derided for being a sectionable and gobby chav with a council estate Christian name and the appearance of a mediocre drug dealer’s wife on a weekend break in Marbella. You will recall that George Osborne was known as ‘oiky’ because he attended only Westminster School; imagine what they all make of Dorries, from Halewood Grange Comprehensive in Liverpool.

Her latest tirade against Cameron and Osborne was a more or less word for word repetition of what she had said, with scarcely less venom, last month: ‘two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk — who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others’.