Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The snobbish attacks on Nadine Dorries

Nadine Dorries (Photo: Getty)

I see the establishment has a new sport: mocking Nadine Dorries. They really do hate her. Or rather, they love taking the mick out of her. She looks drunk! She only has one book on her shelf! She gives car-crash interviews! She wouldn’t know culture if it bit her on the behind! You don’t need a PhD in class studies to work out what’s motoring this frenzied Nadine-bashing: classic, old-fashioned snobbery.

You know a political trend has taken off when it finds its way even on to Instagram, the only social media I use. When even this normally peaceful virtual world of cats and selfies is invaded by political memes, something’s afoot. The Nadine memes have come thick and fast. There’s a shot of her looking angry on Channel 4. There she is on another TV show, live from her home, in front of a virtually bookless shelf. No books – what a thicko. There she is at the dispatch box giving one word answers to Labour’s (silly) questions. ‘What an embarrassment this abrupt woman is’, the smart set says. There she is giving an interview to the BBC and asking the interviewer, whose job it is to ask questions, why he is asking her questions. (Specifically on whether she had recently spoken with Boris Johnson.) The chattering classes cringed in unison. Hasn’t this frightful woman had any media training?

Dorries has essentially become a foil for the middle classes to remind everyone how brilliant and urbane they are

What these Dorriesphobes are really saying is that she is ‘unsophisticated’. Why can’t she be more like us? More refined, better read, more clipped, more proper? Art critic Waldemar Januszczak gave the game away when, following the apparently shocking revelation that there is a shelf in Dorries’ house that doesn’t have books on it, he tweeted a selfie in front of his own heaving bookshelf.

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