Nadine Dorries’ defection might not be the boon Nigel Farage wants

Nadine Dorries has never forgiven the Conservative Party for ousting her hero Boris Johnson, on whom she continues to lavish praise.

Now she’s taken her revenge on the Tories by declaring her support for another charismatic political leader: Reform UK’s Nigel Farage.

Of course, the ex-MP dubbed “Mad Nad” by Labour MPs when she was in Parliament has one thing in common with her new party leader.

They’ve both appeared on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, Dorries in 2012, without permission, for which she had the Conservative whip withdrawn.

And Farage went into the jungle in 2023. So perhaps the pair can now fondly recall eating pigs’ testicles, fish eyes, worms and crocodile anus. Or perhaps not.

“The Tory party is dead,” she declared in the Daily Mail. “Its members now need to think the unthinkable and look to the future.”

Dead? Like the dead parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch? “No, it’s not, it’s resting,” Tory loyalists will no doubt claim. Not entirely convincingly at present, however.

But when Nadine Dorries talks about Conservatives thinking the unthinkable, is she advocating a pact with Reform UK or more defections? It’s not clear.

Another intriguing question: does the Dorries defection increase the possibility of Reform UK landing their biggest catch, the Tories’ biggest beast in exile, Boris Johnson?

Unlikely. Mr Johnson has said the best way for the Conservatives to counter Farage is to ignore him and not mention him. Sound advice for the Tories and Labour, many would say.

Read more:
Nadine Dorries becomes latest Tory to defect to Reform

Dorries was so devoted to Boris that back in 2016 she sobbed at the news conference when he bottled it and announced he wouldn’t stand in the leadership contest after David Cameron quit following his Brexit referendum humiliation.

She never had any time for Cameron. In 2012 she denounced the then PM and his chancellor George Osborne as “two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk”.

And when she quit the Commons she launched a “posh boy” attack on Rishi Sunak, claiming that as chancellor “you flashed your gleaming smile in your Prada shoes and Savile Row suit”, delivered “platitudes” and spoke about “how wonderful life was in California”.

Though a controversial figure, she does have her fans and supporters, who claim that from a working-class background – like Angela Rayner, anyone? – she’s achieved great successes inside and outside politics.

Her novels are massively successful, for instance, and have earned her a lot of money. But she missed out on the peerage she claims Boris Johnson promised her. Boris Johnson? Broken promise? Never, surely.

Yet in the years after he was ousted, Dorries wrote a book entitled The Political Assassination Of Boris Johnson.

It was full of elaborate conspiracy theories claiming a secret Tory cabal, including Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings brought down her hero.

She even claimed Sunak plotted to bring down Johnson by conspiring with a “frightening individual” she codenamed Dr No, after the sinister Bond villain.

So just how big a prize is Dorries’ defection for Reform UK, then? Her I’m a Celebrity jaunt, her novels and her TV chat shows means she passes the famous test.

For most of her political career, however, she was a maverick backbencher. It was Johnson who stunned MPs by appointing her to his cabinet as culture secretary.

But by the time she quit as a Conservative MP in 2023, plunging the party into an unnecessary by-election which it duly lost, she was already an absentee MP.

She hadn’t spoken in the Commons for more than a year and had only voted six times in 12 months. Constituents claimed they hadn’t seen her “in years”.

In her Mid Bedfordshire constituency in Johnson’s 2019 election triumph she had a majority of almost 25,000. Yet in the by-election after she quit Labour won with a swing of more than 20%.

In recent months, Dorries has written in her Daily Mail columns about losing three stone by taking the weight loss drug Mounjaro.

But she says what’s been difficult and agonising for the past 12 months is her decision to leave the Conservative Party after more than 30 years.