Goodbye Nadine: bad Scouser and political joke
On 26 August, Nadine Dorries, former Tory minister and plastic scouser, finally resigned as an MP, two and a half months after announcing that she was standing down ‘with immediate effect’ in June.
Throughout this protracted resignation – which lasted longer than Liz Truss’ entire premiership – Nadine continued to receive her £86,584 salary while refusing to do any of the associated work helping her constituents she was paid to serve.
While less venomous than many of her Tory colleagues, her total incompetence coupled with her obnoxious confrontationalism have cemented her as one of Liverpool’s more embarrassing offspring, though her chaotic gaffes and unintended hilarity will certainly ensure she is missed.
Throughout her time as an MP, Nadine regularly found herself engrossed in scandals. One such instance was when, in 2010, she created a blog to document her constituency work. It quickly transpired, however, that many of the blog’s claims were in fact bullshit, aimed at misleading constituents into believing she was spending more time working locally than in reality.
‘My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact’, she replied when a parliamentary select committee challenged her on this, ‘I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.’
Nadine wasn’t afraid to embrace TikTok to get her message and charm across. Her TikTok debut saw her rapping about her Online Safety Bill in the style of an awkward primary school disco DJ.
In another upload, the Culture, Media and Sport secretary demonstrated just how uninformed she was in her (relatively easygoing) ministerial role, telling viewers how she has made it easier to ‘downstream your movies’ and will ‘make the internet in the UK the safest internet in the world’. She goes on to say how she is ensuring viewers have ‘tennis pitches in your communities to exercise your sports.’
While we have all made similar slip-ups, what makes this video particularly funny is the insight into Nadine’s entirely unserious attitude to her job. Presumably, her colleague recording the video was aware of the mistakes, but either Nadine could not be arsed to do another take, or they simply knew that that was the best they were going to get.
Throughout 2021-2, Nadine’s department was focused on privatising Channel 4, a publicly owned broadcaster funded entirely by its commercial operations, rather than taxpayers’ money.
Created in 1982, Chanel 4 already serves as a platform for independent television production studios so, from a Tory perspective, Nadine’s proposals make little sense, serving only to threaten the channel’s current public service obligations.
Her total lack of awareness of channel 4’s funding model, despite going to such lengths to privatise it, was painfully clear during her November 2021 select committee appearance.
She claimed, to a room of bemused faces, that Chanel 4’s privatisation was reasonable ‘particularly when it is in receipt of public money’, before being informed that this was not the case.
‘So…although its…erm….yeah…and…..erm’, she stumbled, before being rescued by her aide.
Nadine is representative of a strange of tendency. Despite our city’s self-declared leftist credentials, most Merseyside-bred national politicians – such as Esther McKey, Edwina Currie, Gillian ‘everyone else has sat on their arse’ Keegan – seem to go blue, a sad phenomenon which requires further study.
By James Pritchard
