Former Cabinet minister Nadine Dorries (Alamy)
2 min read
Former Cabinet minister Nadine Dorries has become the latest Conservative MP to announce she is standing down.
Dorries, a major ally of former prime minister Boris Johnon, said after “much soul-searching” she had decided to not contest her Mid Bedfordshire seat 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,” said the former culture secretary.
Dorries made the announcement during the latest episode of Friday Night with Nadine, the show that she presents on Talk TV, which will be aired tomorrow night.
Dorries has been a vocal critic of the move by Tory MPs to remove Johnson from 10 Downing Street last year and has publicly said he should be reinstalled as Prime Minister.
She has also lambasted the regime of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on several occasions.
Announcing her plan to stand down, Dorries launched another attack on the Prime Minister and his backers, saying the Conservative party faces a “terminal” defeat at the next general election, with the Tories “polling worse now than in 1997 when they were thrashed by Labour”.
Dorries 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. 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.”
She added that the Conservative MPs who removed Johnson as Tory leader and Prime Minister last summer were already asking “who next?” and accused them of a “lack of cohesion…Â infighting and occasionally the sheer stupidity”.
Dorries is the 19th Conservative MP to announce they are standing down ahead of the next general election, which is expected to take place some time next year.
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