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2 June 2023

Why won’t Dorries declare her Talk TV earnings?

The former culture secretary still hasn’t entered any payments into the MPs’ register of interests.

By The Chatterer

How much is Nadine Dorries being paid for her weekly show on TalkTV? The Chatterer is frustrated to report that we still don’t know.

The former culture secretary first appeared as a host on the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel last October as a temporary fill-in for Piers Morgan, whose salary is rumoured to be around £15m a year for his TalkTV show and Sun column.

Dorries landed her own Friday night show on the channel in February. The first episode, you might recall, featured an interview with her former boss (hero?) Boris Johnson.

And yet, as of early June, there have been no entries in the MPs’ register of interests. We still don’t know her TalkTV salary, or even how much she was paid for her week’s work last October.

When the Mirror highlighted this issue last month, Dorries said she had not at that stage been paid and thanked the newspaper for “reminding me to chase”.

Meanwhile, Dorries’s political ally turned TV rival, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has been happily filing payments for his GB News show. His records suggest that GB News pays him just over £29,000 a month, or around £350,000 a year. Not bad.

[See also: Piers Morgan: “The TalkTV ratings ate at my soul like a flesh-eating bug”]

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