“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”
In this week’s furore over NHS pay, Nadine Dorries is front and centre again. Whenever the government needs someone to loudly defend the indefensible (in that tricky two day gap between announcement and U-turn), they invariably send Nadine over the top.
She is so useful to the Tory party that even when she played hooky on ‘I’m a celebrity..” without telling them, they only suspended her for a few months. Her own special brand of oxymoronic reasoning is clearly irreplaceable.
Strictly speaking, Dorries does not belong to us here at Central Bylines. However, her constituency of Mid Bedfordshire is not currently covered by the network so we are happy to take her under our wing until such time as she finds her forever Bylines home. We’re soft-hearted that way.
Here are just some of the examples her sterling work.
- Health minister Nadine has been very clear this week that her nurses should not receive any more than an extra £3.50 a week out of the public purse. The poor old public purse, apparently, is exhausted. Her choice of phrase is telling: “It’s the most we think we can afford.”
- However, she does not worry quite so much about the poor old public purse when she wants £80k to pay her daughters to work in her office. Even if one of them works for someone else.
- She also appears to have few concerns about the state of the public purse when she claims her expenses. Which totalled nearly £700k in the 2010-2015 period. Trying to look into Nadine’s financial arrangements is like trying to see your way through a plate of spaghetti.
- She staunchly supports Brexit, even if she has no grasp of what it means (to be honest, that probably helps). It came as a surprise to her that we would no longer have MEPs once we’d left the EU. She voted against Theresa May’s Brexit deal because – in her own words – “This deal gives us no voice, no votes, no MEPs, no commissioner.”
- Her eyesight looks to be on a par with her reasoning. On occasion, she has been unable to tell Asian or African people apart. Oh Nadine, do they all look the same to you?
- Neither has her vision improved of late. In October, she needed a crystal ball to spot the coming second lockdown, weeks after everyone else had been screaming for it.
- Recently, she went too far even for this government when she tried to smear Keir Starmer by sharing a fake video from a far right Twitter account. She did get a talking to for that, although it’s not hard to imagine the cheeky wink that came along with it.
