Six months after the Conservative whip was suspended from Nadine Dorries following her stint on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, it has finally been reinstated. It’s undoubtedly the right decision, but the timing of the move is awkward for Cameron. Only after rumours that the MP for Bedfordshire was considering defecting to UKIP (now confirmed by Dorries) was she brought back into the Conservative fold. As I reported last week, the Tory whips have been pushing for her readmission for months but George Osborne, who was still furious about Dorries’s “arrogant posh boys” barb, was unwilling to back down. Now, with Nigel Farage threatening to secure her services, he has curiously had a change of heart. As the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman (who broke the story) points out, it says little about the leadership’s principles that the decision was entirely motivated by political considerations, rather than out of concern for Dorries.
The timing of the move is also a gift to Ed Miliband, who mocked the Tories for running scared of UKIP in his response to the Queen’s Speech. After Peter Bone and Jacob Rees-Mogg called for a pact or coalition with Farage’s party, Miliband quipped: “They used to call them clowns. Now they want to join the circus.” He went on: “The whole point of the Prime Minister’s Europe speech in January was to ‘head off UKIP’. Tory MPs were crowing that the UKIP fox had been shot. It was job done. Mission accomplished. Only it wasn’t. The lesson for the Prime Minister is you can’t out-Farage Farage.”
The Dorries move allows Miliband to claim that, in addition to determining the Conservative Party’s EU policy, the UKIP leader now also dictates who can and can’t be a Tory MP. Farage may not yet be in office, but he is most certainly in power.
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