The final humiliation of Tory saboteur Nadine Dorries

The former minister’s petulant resignation over a peerage, her unquestioning support for Boris Johnson and her very public loathing of Rishi Sunak have brought the Conservative Party to its lowest ebb in a generation, writes Andrew Grice

Former Conservative MP Nadine Dorries (Victoria Jones/PA) (PA Archive)

Labour’s spectacular victory in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election was not just a crushing defeat for Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives. It was the final humiliation for Nadine Dorries, whose petulant decision to resign as the constituency’s MP because she was denied a peerage compounded her party’s uphill task in retaining a seat they had held since 1931.

Dorries’s legacy is now trashed. She hasn’t got the peerage she coveted after her hero Boris Johnson’s discredited list was rightly pared back. He wanted to buck the system by handing close allies like her unprecedented post-dated peerages so they could remain MPs until the next general election, and then move seamlessly to the House of Lords.

Dorries’s threat to resign her seat was intended to secure her peerage but it was met with a collective shrug of shoulders in Downing Street and most of Westminster. Throwing her toys out of the pram was never likely to work. Her weak hand was illustrated by her long goodbye, delaying the Mid Bedfordshire contest for two months and causing what politicians dubbed the longest by-election campaign in history.