Nadine Dorries, maverick MP and former I’m A Celebrity contestant, was quite delighted that her appointment to the post of Secretary of State for Culture sent shockwaves through the establishment.
‘You could hear the almond milk latte cups hitting the floor at the BBC,’ she mischievously quipped at the time.
Nadine shared her amazement over a cup o’ tea. Builders, naturally.
‘I was sitting in a room in Downing Street and my daughter WhatsApp’d me to say Laura Kuenssberg [the BBC political editor]Had tweeted that I was now the Secretary of State. I said, “Well, that can’t be right.”’
Certainly, the woman from the council estate in Liverpool had been expecting some career news — namely that having been a junior minister responsible for mental health, she’d probably risen as far as she was ever going to climb and was probably heading for the exit.
‘There was no way I was going to be promoted. It was my 64th birthday! I’d ordered a greenhouse with double sliding doors. I’d given away my clothes,’ she admits. Please excuse us. ‘My work clothes. I’d packed them in bin bags and given them to Afghan women returning to the workplace.’
She took the call summoning her to Downing Street while ‘sitting in the hairdresser’s’. She argued that the Prime Minister didn’t need to fire her in person. ‘I said, “He doesn’t need to do the speech. He’ll have many hours. I’m fine.”’
After a quick blow-dry, she went ahead anyway. It was a total whirlwind.
Her critics haven’t seen the funny side yet. It was time for left-leaning Twitter to smell salts. One objector commented: ‘Germany’s culture minister is a trained art historian; France’s wrote a book on Verdi. The UK’s new culture secretary . . ate ostrich anus on I’m A Celebrity.’
A Cameron Cutie, as the former prime minister’s cohort of female MPs was patronisingly known, Nadine says she felt ‘inferior’. It is clear that she intends to disrupt that culture by removing the media and art worlds from the control of cliques and giving the football fans back their sport, among other things.
In her first major interview in the post, Nadine, nurse turned businesswoman turned best-selling novelist, snaps a biscuit — ‘give me chocolate. I need the energy’ — and ponders whether it was her stint in the TV celebrity jungle that ultimately sealed her the job of her life. ‘Did it help my political career? It didn’t. It may have hindered my sales. It did not help me to sell 2.4 millions books. Probably.’
We meet in Liverpool where her novels — 15 of them written in seven years — mostly sagas about growing up in poverty-stricken communities in the 1950s and 60s, are set. You are so proud of them. She is a snobbery and misogyny. She concludes with a comment about her misogyny and snobbery.
‘They,’ she says, pointedly, ‘don’t like me because I am a woman, because I am from a working-class background. They want you to retreat, so they will make you bow. [female]Because it’s easier, MPs will do this. I won’t.’
Who is ‘they?’ Does she mean the posh boys whom she famously once said didn’t know the price of milk?
‘I wish I’d never said “posh boys” but they are,’ she says. ‘There are those like David Cameron and George Osborne who struggle to talk to anyone not from their background.’
A Cameron Cutie, as the former prime minister’s cohort of female MPs was patronisingly known, Nadine says she felt ‘inferior’.
It is clear that she intends to question that culture. She wants to free the media and art worlds from the control of cliques. Give back football to fans.
But isn’t Boris the biggest posh boy of all? She insists Johnson, who’d been in Parliament for four years already when she became an MP, never made her feel inferior.
‘My office was just a couple of doors from his and he would have us in for a cup of tea, talk about how to make speeches from the back benches. His welcome was warm. And he has a vision.’
Boris was a statesmanlike man, even before he became PM. ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she says, aware everyone is thinking of his foray into Peppa Pig this week. ‘Those comments he made about Peppa Pig. It’s our biggest export. Because this is my area, I am able to tell. Do not underestimate Boris.’
They are often cut from the same cloth, which she likes. She was called Mad Nad even before she went in the jungle — even her friends, such as fellow author and acerbic observer Sasha Swire, have used the name. She didn’t mind then, but she does now: ‘Because I am not mad.’
But is she really a maverick? She shrugs. ‘I’m not a cardboard cut-out robotic mantra politician. I’m not one of those people who says they wanted to be in politics since they could read, because that’s not normal.’
She laughs as she resentfully looks at William Hagues and makes jokes about future leaders who were her teen years ago. Not for her. Or her children. She’d have been horrified if her daughters had announced a burning desire to get into politics.
She makes a joke about how she would have told them to ‘get into the normal things that teenagers are supposed to get into.’
It is a fun and entertaining experience, as she walks around Liverpool in glamorous hair while wearing a smart raincoat with fashionable boots. We go on a tour of Goodison Park, Everton’s home. She is actually a Liverpool supporter, even though her great-grandfather George Bargery was a founding member of the club.
We walk the streets where she once lived. The house she lived in has been long gone. Even though the area seems very bleak right now, she speaks of the warm community.
Westminster was stunned when Nadine, her husband Paul, split after 33 years and 23 years. She admits now that she regrets the split and believes they should not have been. ‘We were actually reunited,’ she confides. ‘But then Paul was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer.’
She has to pass her brother’s grave every time she comes ‘home’ (he died in a car accident when he was 27) but ‘let’s not talk about that. I only had three hours’ sleep last night, and I’ll cry’.
Ten weeks in, she is already feeling like she has the job of a mad woman. Her portfolio — which covers not only Culture, but Digital, Media and Sport — is not so much full as overflowing. It involves many battles with social media giants, the BBC and professional football teams. It has been much discussed her battle against Leftie wokeism.
‘Define woke-ism,’ she says, trying to become more statesmanlike.
Nadine, come on! All that Nadine used to tweet about was pronouns and gender.
‘Well, statues will not be getting knocked down on my watch, not if I can help it. So, you know, if you’re talking about this culture, which sometimes is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to situations, which could be interpreted as woke or cancel culture, I prefer to take all that wording out of it and look for what it is.’
However, she’s horrified by the spread of woke-ism today in Britain. She hits out at the recent decision by the Brit Awards to scrap gender-specific music categories, insisting that it’s yet another example of women’s rights being eroded.
She is passionate about women’s rights, she says, but not to the point where everyone goes cuckoo. Stella Creasy, another MP, is bringing her baby to the Commons.
She’s a new grandmother, her first granddaughter is 12 weeks old, and shrieks about the noise babies make at this age.
‘The chamber is a professional workplace and there is a creche. It is not a women’s rights issue.’
Her own years juggling children and work led her to set up a childcare company, which made her rich and set her on the path she’s on now. ‘I was making half a million pounds a year, but I set that company up to help women who had to travel for work, do all the things MPs do.’
Similar to Caroline Nokes, she laughs off the claim by Tory MP Caroline Nokes, that Stanley Johnson, father-of Boris, groped her.
Nadine says she is passionate about women’s rights, but not to the point where everyone goes cuckoo. Stella Creasy, a fellow MP, brought her child to the Commons last week. She’s a new grandmother, her first granddaughter is 12 weeks old, and shrieks about the noise babies make at this age. ‘The chamber is a professional workplace and there is a creche. It is not a women’s rights issue.’
‘I don’t believe it happened,’ she says, sharply. ‘I have known Stanley for 15 years. He is an honorable man. This has never happened to me. Maybe there is something wrong with me.’
Is she saying she hasn’t experienced ‘handsy’ sexism? She shrugs. ‘But if you ask me have I experienced mansplaining, being talked down to because I am a woman, yes and yes.’
She did, however, suffer the sort of abuse ‘that puts things in perspective’, from a vicar, who was a family friend, when she was nine. That was never reported to the police — ‘you couldn’t, then’ — but she got a revenge of sorts when she wrote about an abusing priest in her novels.
‘I wanted him to read it and recognise himself,’ she says. Alas, she discovered he’d died before he could.
She’s touchy about some aspects of her family life, insisting she has no memory of an interview her mum gave when she was in the celebrity jungle, saying Nadine was a nightmare at school, and that she worried her daughter would never get a decent job.
‘She is just my mum. Do you think she said she was proud of me at any time? We don’t, with our background.’
Besides, Nadine insists, she did fine at school: ‘I got O-’evels, which was more than most.’
Never was she lacking in ambition. After working as a nurse she was married to Paul, whom she had met when she was 17 years old. They lived for a time in Africa because of Paul’s work as a miner.
According to her, Hers was a late entry in the political arena. It was motivated by fury. ‘It was in the 1990s and I heard someone, I think it must have been John Major, saying something pompous, and Paul said, “Well do something about it.”’
By this stage she had sold her childcare company to Bupa, so ‘I did not need to earn more money’.
While she was elected to the Mid Bedfordshire Assembly, her marriage failed to survive. They split after 33 years of being together and 23 years marriage.
Nadine has been working for ten weeks in what seems like a job of death. Her portfolio — which covers not only Culture, but Digital, Media and Sport — is not so much full as overflowing. It involves fighting with social media giants, the BBC and the football clubs. It has been much discussed her battle against Leftie wokeism.
Now she regrets the split and admits it.
‘We were actually reunited,’ she confides. ‘But then Paul was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer. He died on June 6, 2019, two months after he was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer. He was going to marry again. Paul was desperate to get married again, but he was already dying. The house was blessed by a vicar. It wasn’t an official register office thing.’
He was tended to by their two daughters. ‘We didn’t want anyone else to come in, so we didn’t leave him.’ She talks about how your world shrinks when someone is dying, ‘from the garden, to the bedroom, to the bed’.
Now, she is single. ‘Paul is buried across the road from our house so I say goodnight to him from the bedroom every night. I think I will be single for a long time because he’s keeping an eye on me.’
She’s a bit tearful, but then the old combative Nadine emerges again. Talk about her girls. Although she is very protective of her daughters, she also puts them on the defensive. One time, she had an uncharacteristically Nadine-style argument about nepotism. She was then ejected when it was revealed that her two daughters worked for her. She’s insistent: ‘I did not have them working for me at the same time, at a cost to the taxpayer of £80k. If I’d done that, I’d be in jail.’
She won’t stop ranting against culture in organizations like the BBC that gives children an advantage. ‘I had a conversation with a BBC presenter. He claimed that the newsroom was always home to children of producers. It’s constant.’
In a similar vein, we chat about how can she be the one to ‘clean up’ Twitter when she could be accused of having been less than kind on the platform previously.
Dominic Raab is Deputy Prime Minister, while Sajid Javid Health Secretary and Nadine Dorries are Culture Secretary. This was at Manchester Central Convention Complex in Manchester on October 6, 2021.
Today, she holds her hands up, admitting she sent inappropriate tweets ‘when I was a backbencher with no prospect of promotion’.
She says if she’d known she was going to get a top job, then she probably wouldn’t have been tweeting ‘about some journalist’s testicles’ (to clarify, it was about nailing them to the floor.) But it’s only an apology to a point.
‘I was no angel online, but I was not abusive. If you lived your life with an eye on promotion, you wouldn’t say boo to a goose.’
She says that the men harass her even more.
‘I mean, look at John Nicholson [SNP MP and member of the Parliamentary Culture Media and Sport Select Committee that recently grilled Nadine about her language in tweets]. After I was selected, he retweeted about me numerous times. There are a number of men who I do sometimes lash out at because they harass and they’re obsessive.’
Also, she’ll continue to boo all the geese.
Colourful to the end, she says she won’t be called Grandma, ‘because the other grandmother got there first, and I won’t fight her’.
Instead, she would quite like to be called Hoggie, as she has rescue hedgehogs in her garden, and can’t wait until her granddaughter is old enough to feed them.
Nadine Dorries couldn’t want Granny-name associated with a prickly animal.