Please welcome Nadine Dorries, the BBC’s new best friend

The culture secretary struck an unexpected note when she updated the Commons on boycotting Russia, writes John Rentoul

Nadine Dorries: ‘I think I just held the tears back’ (PA)

For someone who has been called the “culture war secretary” and who announced her arrival in the cabinet by attacking the BBC, Nadine Dorries cut a remarkably consensual figure in the Commons today, praising the bravery of British journalists – including those working for the BBC – in Ukraine.

She had come to parliament to make a statement about various cultural and sporting boycotts imposed on Russia in protest against the invasion. She didn’t have much to announce, because most of these decisions are being taken by independent cultural and sporting bodies, without the need for government action or even pressure.

Yesterday, she celebrated the non-availability of Russia Today, the Russian state propaganda channel, on British TV. The channel “is now down across Sky, Freeview and Freesat”, she said. “The Russian dictator will now find it harder to spread his disinformation and lies.”

Those were commercial decisions taken by the owners of those platforms; they weren’t even instructed by Ofcom, the regulator, which had started investigations into whether RT had breached the conditions of its broadcasting licence; and they certainly weren’t told what to do by Dorries, which is right in a country that values freedom of expression.

But she didn’t mind mentioning it in her statement in the Commons, along with the overnight decision by the International Paralympic Committee to ban Russia and Belarus outright from the Paralympic Games in Beijing. It all helped to give the impression that the government was taking further action to punish the Putin regime, and that she was leading the charge.

“I have been working to mobilise the full might of the UK’s soft power against the Russian state,” she told MPs. “Culture is the third front in the Ukrainian war.” (After military supplies to the Ukrainians and economic sanctions against Russia.)

So, she declared: “The upcoming Champions League final and Formula 1 Grand Prix will no longer be held in Russia.” Again, nothing to do with her, but she was going to take credit for them all: rugby, tennis, ballet, Disney, Warner Bros, Netflix and the Eurovision Song Contest. “Putin is now suffering a sporting and cultural Siberia of his own making,” she said, which is probably offensive to Siberians, but the vivid turn of phrase was immediately quoted on all media outlets.

At the end of her statement, it was to the media that she turned. “I would just like to offer my heartfelt thanks and admiration to all of those journalists working for the BBC…” At this point she paused, later admitting she “just held the tears back”, before continuing: “... ITV and other news outlets, who are risking their lives to bring us unbiased and accurate news from a live war zone.”

Yes, that is the same BBC whose licence fee has been frozen, amounting to deep real-term cuts at a time of inflation. And yes, that is a decision for which she is actually responsible, as secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, although there was some confusion about whether her comment in January about the licence fee being abolished was actually a government decision carrying the full weight of collective ministerial responsibility, or just a headline-seeking aside at a time when the prime minister wanted to intimidate the public service broadcaster.

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Let us put that down to a misunderstanding, then, and welcome Dorries as the BBC’s new best friend and defender around the cabinet table, a huge admirer of its value to us as a nation because it is so highly respected abroad. As she told the Commons: “It was brilliant to see that the audience for the BBC’s Russian language news website has gone up from 3.1 million to 10.7 million in the past week”.

She even heaped praise on Chris Bryant, the Labour MP, who told her the government should go further on the sanctioning of individuals. “The UK has not yet seized a single yacht, flat or property of any kind while other countries in Europe are able to do that,” he said. She did not quite say, “I know, I simply cannot understand it,” but she did say, “I commend him” for his campaigning on this issue and that it was basically the Foreign Office’s problem.

And she agreed with him on football. “We have tolerated the investment of Russian kleptocrats for far too long,” she said. Whichever party has been in power for the past 12 years has been a disgrace, she didn’t quite add.

It was interesting to see a right-wing politician doing triangulation almost as well as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did it in the opposite direction. Nadine Dorries, former scourge of pinko journalism funded by a poll tax, is now the darling of brave public service broadcasting and the enemy of rich foreigners treating great British football clubs as their playthings.

Then off she went to host a Zoom meeting of sports ministers from Australia, Poland, the Netherlands, Latvia, Italy, Finland, the Czech Republic, Norway and Canada “to build a global coalition against the Putin regime”. Verily, she is the people’s Nadine.