The final humiliation of Tory saboteur Nadine Dorries

The former minister’s petulant resignation over a peerage, her unquestioning support for Boris Johnson and her very public loathing of Rishi Sunak have brought the Conservative Party to its lowest ebb in a generation, writes Andrew Grice

Former Conservative MP Nadine Dorries (Victoria Jones/PA) (PA Archive)

Labour’s spectacular victory in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election was not just a crushing defeat for Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives. It was the final humiliation for Nadine Dorries, whose petulant decision to resign as the constituency’s MP because she was denied a peerage compounded her party’s uphill task in retaining a seat they had held since 1931.

Dorries’s legacy is now trashed. She hasn’t got the peerage she coveted after her hero Boris Johnson’s discredited list was rightly pared back. He wanted to buck the system by handing close allies like her unprecedented post-dated peerages so they could remain MPs until the next general election, and then move seamlessly to the House of Lords.

Dorries’s threat to resign her seat was intended to secure her peerage but it was met with a collective shrug of shoulders in Downing Street and most of Westminster. Throwing her toys out of the pram was never likely to work. Her weak hand was illustrated by her long goodbye, delaying the Mid Bedfordshire contest for two months and causing what politicians dubbed the longest by-election campaign in history.

The campaign itself added to her humiliation. The Tories’ opponents gleefully dubbed her an “absentee MP” who, having representing the area since 2005, no longer lived there and was accused of turning her back on her constituents, a charge she strongly denied but which was echoed by voters interviewed by the media during the campaign.

Inevitably, Tory sources are pointing to her antics as they conduct a painful inquest into their defeat. Dorries saw this coming, tweeting this week: “Of course No 10 are planning to blame me. Rishi’s personal rating on the negative floor, at minus 25, as Starmer’s leaps upwards. Labour Party polling 20 points ahead of Tories – but it was always going to be my fault if Tories lose Mid Beds, never Rishi’s.”

She predicted, wrongly, the Tories would just hold the seat. Instead, her departure will be remembered for a result which the former chancellor George Osborne believes means “Armageddon is coming for the Tory party”.

Dorries’s behaviour, and her unwavering support for Johnson to return even after his own party had ousted him as a toxic figure, added to the contamination of the Tory brand. The outspoken Brexiteer was part of the gang that helped Johnson throw away the Tories’ biggest majority since 1987 as voters saw through his “cake and eat it” politics and deceit at the 2016 Brexit referendum, and were repelled by his casual relationship with the truth, notably on Partygate.

Her personal support for Johnson saw the former nurse rise up the political ladder, to the surprise of Tory colleagues who recalled her appearance on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here in 2012.

She went from junior health minister to a cabinet post as culture secretary (where she was popular with civil servants, despite her hostility towards the BBC). It was a remarkable ascent for the girl who grew up on a Liverpool council estate.

Now Dorries has lost her place in parliament, and has little chance of getting it back. For a while, she will retain her TalkTV programme and Daily Mail column, but will have the dead word “former” attached to her name.

Dorries, a successful novelist, will doubtless enjoy one last short blast of fame when her book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, is published. It was due in September, on the eve of the Tory conference, but delayed until next month for legal reasons. Characteristically, Dorries is promising to reveal “a corruption of democracy deep at the heart of the Conservative Party” that will make House of Cards look “tame.”

Perhaps. She will inevitably seek to wound Sunak, having repeatedly accused him of bringing down Johnson. Yet this might be seen as more sour grapes for not landing her peerage.

The other danger for Dorries is that the world has moved on and her book might be viewed as the dying embers of a period her own party would rather forget as it faces a very difficult election.

The Tories’ problem is that the voters have not yet forgotten the trauma of the Johnson and Truss eras. John Curtice, the elections guru, made a good point today: Labour might not be enjoying its huge opinion poll lead and by-election triumphs without Partygate and Truss’s disastrous economic experiment.

Dorries will be unrepentant. In continuing to view Johnson as a Churchillian giant brought down by pygmies, she merely serves to prolong the Tories’ agony. A period of silence from her would be welcomed by her party, but it shouldn’t hold its breath.