AS a teenager, I remember finding it excruciatingly awkward whenever I heard a friend’s parents arguing. I have similar feelings about this latest instalment of Tory infighting.
As the party comes to terms with the fact it is likely to lose the next election, its soon-to-be-unemployed MPs are either on manoeuvres, or out for revenge.
Then there’s Nadine Dorries, the walking embodiment of the phrase “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.
A mere 11 weeks after she first promised to go, Dorries has finally formally resigned her seat. Her blistering – and at times completely unhinged – resignation letter to the Prime Minister was worth the wait.
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There is something morbidly fascinating about the way Dorries has handled her exit from Parliament. Often, departing MPs are mindful of crafting a legacy for themselves. They want to maximise their attractiveness to potential employers. So fair play to Dorries for caring more about causing maximum damage to a man who she feels wronged her than her future career prospects.
Her resignation letter to the Prime Minister is nearly 2000 words long. Approximately 1500 of those words are just her telling Rishi Sunak that she thinks he’s an eejit.
One of my favourite parts is where she tells the Prime Minister that she was grateful for his personal phone call on the morning he appointed his Cabinet “even if I declined to take it”. Dorries offers a masterclass in how to bypass passive aggression and go straight for the jugular.
I have little patience for MPs’ resignation statements that rely on innuendo and interpretation, where commentators pour over format and word choice to try to detect discord. Give me a nakedly bitter and angry rant over the whole damning with faint praise thing any day of the week.
One of the (many) things Dorries is unhappy about is the Prime Minister’s failure to introduce regulatory reform to attract tech sector investment. She says that when he met industry leaders: “You flashed your gleaming smile in your Prada shoes and Savile Row suit from behind a camera but you just weren’t listening.”
Later, she asks why the UK has had five Conservative prime ministers since 2010, with “none of the previous four having left office as the result of losing a General Election”. The answer, she says, is a “democratic deficit that the mother of parliaments should be ashamed of”.
Oddly, she doesn’t seem to make the link between the chaos her party has inflicted upon the UK and its anti-democratic refusal to go back to the electorate for its verdict.
Her issue isn’t with the misdeeds of her party and its leaders, rather the “plotters” who ousted the lying Boris Johnson and the totally inept Liz Truss.
Dorries says that her party has got through so many prime ministers in such a short space of time due to the “machinations of a small group of individuals embedded deep at the centre of the party and Downing Street”. But we can forgive Nadine Dorries for her tendency to rewrite history because what she lacks in reliable analysis she more than makes up for in comedy value.
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Where Sunak has been the subject of Dorries’s poison pen, Boris Johnson is getting the love-letter treatment from his former colleague. She is currently writing a book which promises the “seismic, untold story of how the most charismatic politician of his generation was driven from office”.
The book is due to be released in late September but we’ve heard no word yet about how many pages will be dedicated to photos of Dorries gazing lovingly at the blond bombshell himself.
Like any responsible author, Dorries (below) has been doing plenty of research. In her letter to Sunak, she said her investigations “focused on the political assassination” of Johnson. She says what she uncovered “grew ever more disturbing with each person I spoke to”. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on anybody else’s writing process but I would like to know how much wine was involved.
She accuses the prime minister of being part of a shadowy plot to intimidate her into silence. “Forces,” she says, were out to get her: “And, as you also know, Prime Minister, those forces are today the most powerful figures in the land.’’
As amusing as this Tory feeding frenzy is, it’s also horrifying to think that we’re being held in a Union with them without any opportunity to exit.
The Conservative Party might be in government and contain some of the most “powerful figures in the land” but it’s also completely detached from reality. It seems to me Dorries’s verdict on Sunak’s record is also applicable to this failing Union.
“Bewildered, we look in vain for the grand political vision for the people of this great country to hold on to, that would make all this disruption and subsequent inertia worthwhile, and we find absolutely nothing.”
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