Known variously as “Mad Nad” and the Conservatives’ answer to Heather Mills, the MP for Mid-Bedfordshire didn’t want Cameron
as party leader: “he represented everything that through my life . . . I’d been suspicious of.” Cameron is the one who should be suspicious. A member of the Cornerstone Group, Nadine Dorries couldn’t be further from media-friendly compassionate conservatism. Her energetic defence of expenses included an insistence that MPs were near-suicidal with worry, and claims for £18,000 to cover rent on a “second home.”
Dorries’s creative interpretation of facts undermines causes that Cameron supports. To back up her stance against late-term abortion, she propagated an internet rumour that a 21-week-old foetus could punch through an incision in a womb. And her vendetta against the Speaker, John Bercow, is at odds with the Tory leader’s recent support for Bercow in his constituency seat.