Category Archives: Nadine Dorries

Rishi Sunak and Tories seem to have yet more low expectations for byelection fortunes

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Leaked memo suggests party’s votes could halve to 30% in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire

In the world of expectation management, a “leaked” memo can be a useful tool for a political party on the eve of a tricky byelection. So the publication of an internal report prepared for the Conservative party chair, Greg Hands, was initially met with some scepticism.

The document, based on telephone canvassing data from recent days, claimed the Tory vote in Thursday’s two byelections in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire could halve to about 30%, creating more problems for Rishi Sunak.

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Labour and Lib Dems in bitter battle over Mid Bedfordshire byelection

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Disagreements over who is best placed to take Nadine Dorries’s seat could threaten tactical voting strategies at general election

The fierce byelection battle in Mid Bedfordshire is poisoning relations between Labour and the Lib Dems and risks denting informal cooperation to remove the Tory government, senior Labour figures have warned.

An incredibly close three-way battle has emerged in the seat formerly held by Boris Johnson ally Nadine Dorries, who quit after being refused a place on the former prime minister’s peerages list. Labour and the Lib Dems are both convinced they have the better chance of overturning the colossal 24,664-vote majority and pulling off one of the biggest byelection wins in history this week.

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Nadine Dorries formally resigns as MP after 11-week delay

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Former culture secretary’s resignation letter accuses Rishi Sunak of risking her safety by ‘whipping a public frenzy’

Nadine Dorries has handed in her resignation letter 11 weeks after announcing she would resign in protest over not receiving a peerage.

The MP for Mid Bedfordshire announced that she would be leaving her seat with “immediate effect” in June but had failed to do so until today.

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Call for investigation into Nadine Dorries over failure to quit as MP

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More than half of people believe MP’s absence is significantly damaging parliament’s reputation, poll shows

A campaign group has written to the standards watchdog asking for an investigation into Nadine Dorries after its poll suggested more than half of people believe her absence as an MP and failure to quit has significantly damaged parliament’s reputation.

Tom Brake, the director of Unlock Democracy, called for an inquiry after the group commissioned an Opinium survey that found 55% of people thought Dorries had caused significant damage by failing to speak in parliament and delaying her decision to quit.

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Nadine Dorries urged to quit as MP by council in her constituency

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Call for ex-minister to stand down comes nearly two months after she vowed to leave ‘with immediate effect’

A council in Nadine Dorries’s constituency is demanding that she immediately resign as an MP, saying “residents desperately need effective representation now”.

The former culture secretary announced on 9 June that she was standing down as the MP for Mid Bedfordshire “with immediate effect”, but she has yet to formally resign.

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Nadine Dorries frustrates Sunak by failing to officially resign as MP

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No 10 says constituents in Mid Bedfordshire deserve certainty as it piles pressure on ex-minister to stand down

Downing Street is heaping pressure on Nadine Dorries to stand down as soon as possible, saying her constituents in Mid Bedfordshire deserve certainty.

The former culture secretary said last Friday she would “immediately” step down, after she was denied a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours.

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Lib Dems rule out tactical voting pact with Labour in byelections

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Leader Ed Davey says party will fight for both seats after resignations of Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries

Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has ruled out a formal pact with Labour to encourage tactical voting in order to beat the Conservatives in the byelections triggered by Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries’ shock resignations.

Dorries, one of Johnson’s fiercest cheerleaders, quit parliament on Friday after being told she would not be elevated to the House of Lords in Johnson’s resignation honours list. Johnson followed suit hours later, ditching his outer-London seat with a bitter resignation statement accusing Rishi Sunak of leading a government that is “not properly Conservative” and attacking the Partygate investigation.

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Sunak approves Boris Johnson honours list including aides linked to Partygate

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PM gives green light to list that also includes knighthood for Jacob Rees-Mogg and damehood for Priti Patel

Rishi Sunak has been accused of allowing Boris Johnson to hand out rewards to those involved in the Partygate scandal, including more than 40 honours and peerages for his closest allies at the time.

The prime minister faced criticism for approving the list despite police looking at fresh potential evidence of rule-breaking in Downing Street and Chequers during lockdown, as well as an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into whether Johnson misled the Commons.

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Boris Johnson’s disciples gathered to sing the old hymns. But are they a real threat to Sunak?

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Familiar faces on the Tory right met in Bournemouth to pour scorn on the government. And they can certainly make the PM’s life harder

• Read more: Tory anarchy breaks out as revolt looms on Brexit laws

It was billed as the launch of a campaign to hand more power to Tory members. It was not, its organisers repeatedly insisted, a group aiming to reinstall Boris Johnson as party leader – or cause trouble for Rishi Sunak. It was about “taking back control” of the Conservative party for the grassroots.

Yet as the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) met for its inaugural gathering in a sunny Bournemouth on Saturday, it was less than 15 minutes after Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns had belted out the national anthem that Johnson’s name was first uttered on stage.

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BBC apologises for failure to scrutinise Nadine Dorries’ claims about Sue Gray

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Former culture secretary called into question neutrality of civil servant after her appointment as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff

The BBC has apologised for the failure to properly scrutinise claims made by Nadine Dorries on a radio show, capping a day of controversies for the corporation.

The broadcaster said in a statement on Friday that “there should have been more challenge” when the former culture secretary and Boris Johnson loyalist made allegations about Sue Gray on Radio 4’s World at One.

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Boris Johnson dangles threat of rebellion over Northern Ireland deal

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Most Tory MPs welcome breakthrough as hardline Brexiters are mulling response

Boris Johnson is dangling the threat of a rebellion over Rishi Sunak after a new post-Brexit deal was announced that will rip up the former prime minister’s protocol on Northern Ireland and ditch his legislation to override it.

Although most Conservative MPs warmly welcomed the breakthrough after two years of negotiations, Johnson stayed away from the House of Commons chamber and is said not to have made up his mind about whether to endorse or oppose the “Windsor framework”.

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Labour dismisses Rishi Sunak’s five new pledges as mostly ‘so easy it would be difficult not to achieve them’ – as it happened

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Prime minister urges public to judge him on whether he delivers on new pledges but Labour says most ‘were happening anyway’. This blog is now closed

Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, has issued a statement welcoming the government’s proposal to abandon the privatisation of Channel (without actually putting it in those terms). She says the government should never have floated the plan in the first place, and that it has been a “total distraction” for the broadcaster. She says:

The Conservatives’ vendetta against Channel 4 was always wrong for Britain, growth in our creative economy, and a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Our broadcasting and creative industries lead the world, yet this government has hamstrung them for the last year with the total distraction of Channel 4 privatisation.

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UK set for new wave of strikes as civil servants and train drivers vote for action – politics live

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Around 100,000 civil servants, working in multiple government agencies, have voted to strike in a dispute over pay, pensions and jobs.

According to Pat Leahy, political editor of the Irish Times, the Irish government is doubtful about the prospect of a breakthrough in the coming weeks in the talks on the Northern Ireland protocol.

In his Sky News interview Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, also suggested that large number of politicians in parliament are voting for Matt Hancock to perform “grim” tasks on I’m A Celebrity. My colleague Aubrey Allegretti has the story here.

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Liz Truss meets European leaders in Prague as Irish deputy PM says NI protocol ‘a little too strict’ – as it happened

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This live blog has now closed, you can find our latest political coverage here

In his interview with LBC Jake Berry, the Tory chairman, was asked if he was channelling When Harry Met Sally when he described Liz Truss as the “Yes, yes, yes prime minister” in his speech to the conference yesterday. (Robert Hutton is very funny about this, and much else, in his sketch for the Critic.) Berry said he was referring to Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister when he delivered that line.

In the same interview, Berry revealed that his joke-making has not improved since yesterday. Talking about the conference in general, Berry said:

I think colleagues saw yesterday that when the going gets tough, the Truss gets going.

I do think my language was a bit clumsy in that regard and I regret it.

The point I was making ... is that the government needs to go for growth to ensure that it can grow the economy and Britain can get a pay rise. You don’t have to tell me how hard people graft in this economy. I know how hard people work.

We’ve got to wait until those figures are available … You simply cannot make a decision on figures you do not currently have.

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‘Arghhhhhhhhh’: the 10 angriest Tories at Conservative conference

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Never have so many angry things been said by so many Tories about each other in a single day as on Monday. We rank the 10 most irate MPs

This piece is extracted from our First Edition newsletter. To sign up, click here.


The Tories assembled in Birmingham are fighting over lots of things. They’re fighting over the 45p tax U-turn, and the prospect of a swingeing benefit cut, and whether or not it’s OK for the Home Secretary to accuse backbenchers of mounting a coup. But above all, deep down, they’re mostly fighting about whether Liz Truss has got what it takes. There may never have been so many angry things said by so many Tories about each other in a single day as there were on Monday. It’s not the ideal introduction for the most important speech of Liz Truss’ life.

Some of them are angrily making headlines by saying exactly what they bloody well think; others are angrily making headlines by telling the first lot to put a sock in it. The mood is a little delirious. An amazing video appeared on Tuesday of at least three people appearing to sleep soundly through health secretary Thérèse Coffey’s speech in the main hall, but on Wednesday morning I find myself wondering if they weren’t obscure backbenchers who somebody had poisoned.

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Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss facing Tory members in Leeds for first official leadership hustings – UK politics live

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Leadership rivals bid to win members’ support in foreign secretary’s home town

Drug-related deaths in Scotland fell by nine in 2021, according to the latest figures released by National Records of Scotland, the first decrease since 2013 but falling well short of the significant reduction that campaigners are calling for.

The latest figure of 1,330 is still the second highest annual total on record, and Scotland continues to have by far the highest drug death rate recorded by any country in Europe and five times the rate in England.

We’ve had a raft of reports, policies and strategies that say what needs to change, and families are more likely to be included round the table, but it’s much harder to track their influence on the ground. We don’t understand what’s getting in the way of good words becoming good deeds.

1,330 of our fellow Scots have died entirely preventable deaths and we should not be celebrating this as an achievement ... The solutions are no secret. We need action, not reports with recommendations that are never implemented.

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Channel 4 privatisation plan could be dropped by next prime minister

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Tory MPs are ambivalent on the issue and there is uncertainty over what a caretaker government can do

Channel 4’s privatisation could be dropped by the next prime minister, with plans to sell the channel unlikely to be published before September.

Boris Johnson had already signed off on proposals to sell the publicly owned broadcaster, and the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, had been preparing to push the law authorising the change through parliament in the autumn.

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Nadine Dorries mistakes rugby league for union code at World Cup event

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  • Culture secretary thought Jonny Wilkinson won league prize
  • RFL chief executive refuses to criticise MP over comment

Nadine Dorries, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, stunned a rugby league audience by confusing the 13-man game with the rival code.

Speaking in St Helens at the launch of a report into the social impact made by the upcoming Rugby League World Cup, Dorries opened her address with a reference to Jonny Wilkinson’s match-winning drop goal for England in union’s 2003 Rugby World Cup.

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Partygate live: Sue Gray report due next week after police end investigation with 126 fines

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Met police close inquiry with Downing Street yet to confirm whether Boris Johnson has received new fine

Dorries says Channel 4 is dependent on one stream of revenue - advertising.

But this revenue is going down, she says. And she says advertisers have more choice.

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Boris Johnson’s criticism of sexist smear against Angela Rayner inadequate, says Labour – UK politics live

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Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves says action is needed, ‘not just warm words’

The Downing Street lobby briefing has just ended. And we’ve learned that Boris Johnson has not received a fine over the party in the Downing Street garden on 20 May 2020 – or at least not yet.

There has been speculation that he will be fined for this because at the end of last week it emerged that other people who attended the event in response to an invitation from Johnson’s then principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, are being fined. The invitation told people to BYOB (bring your own bottle).

I, and others in Whitehall, have been clear that the prime minister himself had no direct involvement in decisions around Nowzad.

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