'I'm outraged by Nadine Dorries - even my dying dad did his job as an MP'

22 August 2023 , 19:10

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Nadine Dorries announced in June she was standing down (Image: Getty Images)

My dad was a – hopefully needless to say, Labour – MP for over 20 years.

Throughout my entire ­childhood, every other weekend we went to Birmingham, the area he grew up in, for his constituency surgery on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. There were fixed hours, but he always stayed until every person who turned up had been seen, even if that meant being in the doghouse with my mum for coming in so late. Week in, week out, year in, year out, this was the consistent pattern of our lives. And my dad wasn’t unusual – that was, and is, just the job.

So when the excellent James O’Brien challenged his LBC listeners to guess when Nadine Dorries last did an in-person surgery in Flitwick, I was expecting him to say June, when she announced her faux resignation, and I’d have been outraged at that. The answer was 2020. Nadine Dorries hasn’t held a surgery there for more than three years. Her constituency office is now a dance studio.

She’s found time to write a book about how great Boris Johnson is, and regularly host a TV show, but not for the people who gave her the job she gets paid £86,000 a year to do. MPs aren’t most people’s first port of call. Far from it. Situations usually have to be fairly serious for them to be contacted, and it’s when their constituents feel they have no one else to turn to. Surgeries are essential, not optional.

Dorries announced that she was going to quit on June 9, but anyone backing the lettuce in this fight would have lost three times over by now. Two local councils have urged her to step down immediately so a by-election can be held to replace her, saying she has ­“abandoned the local area”. They added that Flitwick “desperately needs effective representation now”.

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And even current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak admitted that: “At the moment people aren’t being properly represented.” It’s presumed she’s dragging her heels to punish Sunak for putting the kibosh on her peerage. Clearly it’s not the bazillionaire in one of his mansions who is being punished though, it’s the hard-working regular Joes and Josephines who voted her into the pram she’s throwing her toys out of.

In what other job could you not turn up for work, have your boss publicly agreeing you’re falling well short, but not be sacked, and still earn a salary most of us could only ever dream of? All the while coyly insisting that you have Imposter Syndrome? One of the last times my dad left home was to vote on a bill in the Houses Of Parliament. He was dying and he still made it. Dorries hasn’t voted since April.

My dad obviously looked so unwell that everyone knew they wouldn’t see him again, and as he got up to leave, both sides of the House gave him a standing ovation. I only know this because a colleague of his told me at his funeral – dad had not said a word about it on the drive home that day, after my mum picked him up outside parliament. There will probably be applause when Dorries eventually leaves that building, too. But I’m proud to say, for reasons that could not be more different.

Polly Hudson