Nadine Dorries: is MP stepping down, what did she say on Twitter - did Boris Johnson tell her to stay?

Former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has announced that she will be standing down as an MP at the next general election. Dorries, who represents Mid Bedfordshire and has been an MP since 2005, hit out at her party’s decision to remove Boris Johnson as Prime Minister as she used her new TalkTV show to confirm her departure.

The Tory MP has been a vocal critic of Rishi Sunak and his government since he entered Number 10, hitting out again on Thursday (9 Feb) at those who “bet everything on a Rishi bounce”.

What did Nadine Dorries say?

Dorries said: “After much soul-searching, I have decided not to stand as an MP at the next general election. I love my constituents and I’ve loved serving them – it’s been such an honour for the best part of two decades of my life.”

Dorries went on to offer a bleak assessment of where the Conservative Party stands ahead of the next election, expected to be in around 18 months’ time.

She said: “The elite, the faux political intellectuals, you know who I’m talking about – those who believe they know better than anyone else, bet everything on a Rishi bounce… but it never came and it was never going to. The party was five points behind on the day Boris was ousted… and that was a poll deficit that would have burnt away like a summer’s mist on a morning lawn in the heat of a general election campaign.

“Today it’s 24 points behind. And that, my friends, could be described as terminal. It leaves the party boxed into a corner with no exit route.”

It has been suggested that Dorries is in line for a peerage, as part of Johnson’s resignation honours list, however Dorries said that she has “heard nothing” about it.

She claimed that the former Prime Minister had urged her to stay on, saying: “He doesn’t want me to go… he said, ‘Nads stay’.”

TalkTV released a clip of Dorries making the announcement on Twitter, with the full segment to air tonight, Friday (10 Feb), on her Friday Night with Nadine programme at 8pm.

In the clip, Dorries said: “Those MPs who drank the Kool-Aid and got rid of Boris Johnson are already asking themselves the question: who next? And I’m afraid that the lack of cohesion, the infighting and occasionally the sheer stupidity from those who think we could remove a sitting Prime Minister, who secured a higher percentage of the vote share than Tony Blair did in 1997, just three short years ago…

“That they could do that and the public would let us get away with it. I’m afraid it’s this behaviour that I now just have to remove myself from. And so, despite it being a job that I’ve loved for every year that I’ve done it, I’m now off. Oh gosh, I’ve just said it out loud, there’s no going back now.”

Who is Nadine Dorries?

Dorries was born in 1957 in Liverpool and grew up on a council estate, which she writes about on her official website, saying: “I learnt to communicate with people from all walks of life.”

She started her working life as a nurse before pursuing a career in business, opening a child daycare business before becoming a director at Bupa. Her career as a writer has seen her author more than 10 books, among them The Four Streets Quartet novels, as well as The Angels series about the nurses of Lovely Lane.

Before her election to Parliament as MP for Mid Bedfordshire in 2005, she worked for three years as an adviser to the former shadow home secretary and shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin.

Dorries was thrust into the limelight in 2012 when she was suspended from the Conservative Party for appearing on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! without informing the chief whip first. However, she was readmitted to the party in May 2013.

Her first ministerial appointment was as Minister of State for Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health, during which she garnered criticism for rejecting cross-party talks to discuss a package of mental health support for frontline workers during the pandemic.

In September 2021, Dorries was promoted to Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. In her time in the role she was a frequent advocate for BBC reform, and led the now-ditched plan to privatise Channel 4.

Despite backing Liz Truss in the race for leadership following Johnson’s resignation, Dorries decided not to continue as Culture Secretary when Truss took over as Prime Minister.

Dorries has been embroiled in a string of controversies throughout her tenure as an MP.

In 2009, when MPs’ expenses claims were revealed by the Daily Telegraph, she admitted she had got taxpayers to foot the bill for a lost £2,190 deposit on a rented flat. The following year, in 2010, she was rebuked by parliamentary standards commissioner John Lyon for misleading her constituents on her blog about how much time she spent in mid-Bedfordshire, admitting that it was “70% fiction”.

The mother to three daughters has also frequently been at odds with what she thought of as her party’s image, memorably referring to David Cameron and George Osborne as “arrogant posh boys”, while describing herself as “a normal mother who comes from a poor background and who didn’t go to a posh school”.

Having sold more than 2.5 million copies of her books, the 65-year-old’s departure from politics is expected to enable her to return to writing.