The departure of Nadine Dorries hasn’t been met with much sadness in the Tory party. “I’m yet to speak to a colleague who is sorry to see her go,” one Conservative MP told me. “If by sadness you mean relief and delight, yes,” added a former minister.
The relief is that Dorries, a key Boris Johnson backer, has finally begun the process of formally quitting the House of Commons, 78 days after she first announced her intention to do so with “immediate effect”, after a row over a peerage. The delay, along with the fact that she had not spoken in the Commons since June 2022, has provided opposition parties with plenty of attack lines over the summer recess.
