The shameless Tory had too many strings to her bow to care much about Mid Bedfordshire
efore she was known as “Dosser Dorries”, the now former MP advertised her delight in relocating to “idyllic” Mid Bedfordshire, where she’d just been elected. People moved there, “as I have, because they wanted to wake up to the sound of birdsong rather than the incessant hum of traffic”. Vowing to “base everything I do on integrity”, she concluded: “I will always do my best for the people of Mid Bedfordshire, the place that I now call home.
It was a strange thing for her to call Mid Bedfordshire, because Nadine Dorries really lived in Stratford-on-Avon. Even when, after two years, she finally submitted to the call of birdsong, she maintained another home in Stratford, or thereabouts, awhich the parliamentary commissioner for standards took some time to unravel after questions were asked about which property was benefiting from parliamentary allowances.
However delicious it was to watch Dorries embarrass her colleagues until it suited her to stop, it demonstrates, like the expenses scandal, how well the current system can protect the least deserving of MPs. After the party leadership was careless enough not to make permanent her suspension – for an unauthorised appearance on– her Tory-supporting constituents were unable to insist on either a replacement or reform. A month after readmission, an unrepentant Dorries said how much she’d like to do.
As complex as it is to calibrate how much Dorries can take credit for normalising extreme MP moonlighting, when, among others, Geoffrey Cox, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson have also done so much, her achievement in juggling political duties with the relentless production of novels, a third career on TalkTV and a fourth one as acolumnist, looks almost uniquely harsh on affected constituents.
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