Is this the moment Dishy Rishi became Ruthless Rishi?

It would do the PM no harm at all to be seen to be as pugilistic as his now-sworn enemies, writes Sean O’Grady

The prime minister is heading back towards a 20-point deficit against Labour (PRU/AFP via Getty Images)

Has Rishi Sunak finally bared his teeth? Goaded behind endurance by Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions as “too weak” to block Boris Johnson’s, shall we say, problematic honours list, our polite prime minister has turned a bit nasty, and verbally savaged Nadine Dorries, no one’s idea of a slight and delicate creature.

At PMQs Sunak was blunt – and made it clear that Dorries’ constituents in Mid Bedfordshire deserve better. The prime minister stated that they deserve “proper representation”, and that he was “looking forward” to a by-election in the former culture secretary’s seat.

Seeing little Rishi turning on the woman known in some circles as Mad Nad was a little like watching the family pet cockapoo square up to the neighbourhood pit bull – and tear a chunk out of it. Sunak’s spins doctor adds that the current limbo over her formal resignation was “obviously unusual…The prime minister believes the people of Mid-Bedfordshire need proper representation in this House. He will be looking forward to campaigning on behalf of the Conservative candidate.”

Team Sunak is losing its patience with the right and the deluded “Bring Back Boris” brigade. About time, too.

Dorries claims she was the victim of “sinister forces” and “posh boys” (Sunak and his aide James Forsyth) snobbishly depriving a heroic Scouse girl born in poverty of her opportunity to join the aristocracy, presumably through a mixture of snobbery and Remainiac resentment.

The truth seems more prosaic. As The Independent’s exclusive revealed, Johnson was advised as long ago as February that Dorries would have had to quit her seat to go to the Lords, and if she did it’d be fine. Johnson therefore either didn’t understand what he was told, he forgot, or for sinister purposes of his own, he did not pass the information on to his friend Nadine (nor Alok Sharma and Nigel Adams, the other two dispossessed figures).

Anyway, it marks a welcome change in tactics from Sunak and his team. Rather than just sitting there like human punchbags waiting for Johnson and Dorries to swing wildly, they’ve decided to push back. More, please.

It would do Sunak no harm at all to be seen to be as ruthless as his now-sworn enemies, and at this stage in his government, he needs to take the initiative and frame his own narrative, instead of just reacting to others’.

He should publish his side of the Dorries story, with documentary back-up, and make her and Johnson look like the paranoid fools they are. He should condemn her, and Johnson, for disparaging the probity of the Privileges Committee, and, in her case, take the Tory whip off her for her disloyalty. She may well hang around the Commons long enough to try and cause more trouble, and, under cover of parliamentary privilege, launch fresh conspiracies about the fall of Johnson and her own lack of ennoblement.

To a nation worried about putting food on the table, this multimillionaire’s screams of anguish about remaining plain “Ms Dorries” will sound self-centred indeed. Obscene, frankly. It is as if she, Dorries, has forgotten her own origins, and no longer cares about the party that has already done so much for her, including ludicrously over-promoting her to the cabinet. Best-selling author of low brow novels (with some very bad sex in them) as she is, it does still feel like Johnson made her culture secretary for a joke, just to wind up the luvvies.

Sunak makes an unnecessary virtue out of following process. Politics is not a process world, though. He doesn’t need to become as completely lawless as Johnson – because the system would rightly catch up with him – but he no longer needs to be quite so fastidious about wielding power.

He’s heading back towards a 20-point deficit against Labour, with only about a year to go before the election realistically should be called. He needs to unite his party, and he needs to give it some much needed discipline.

Ironically, Sunak needs to adopt the sort of ruthless tactics used by Johnson and Dominic Cummings in the winter of 2019 to “get Brexit done”. In the process he might end up purging the hard right, who are doing their very best to destroy not only the Conservative government, but also the party itself.

He can start with chucking Dorries out, then Johnson (the privileges committee report will supply ample grounds), and then the ERG. After all, it’s exactly what “Sir Softy” Starmer did to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left. C’mon Rishi, show some teeth – you’ve nothing to lose now.