Before she was known as “Dosser Dorries”, the now former MP advertised her delight in relocating to “idyllic” Mid Bedfordshire, where she’d just been elected. People moved there, “as I have, because they wanted to wake up to the sound of birdsong rather than the incessant hum of traffic”. Vowing to “base everything I do on integrity”, she concluded her maiden speech in 2005: “I will always do my best for the people of Mid Bedfordshire, the place that I now call home.”
It was a strange thing for her to call Mid Bedfordshire, because Nadine Dorries really lived in Stratford-on-Avon. Even when, after two years, she finally submitted to the call of birdsong, she maintained another home in Stratford, or thereabouts, a complicated arrangement which the parliamentary commissioner for standards took some time to unravel after questions were asked about which property was benefiting from parliamentary allowances. It did not help that she had pretended to live in Mid Bedfordshire when her main home was elsewhere. “It was unrealistic of Ms Dorries,” John Lyon concluded in 2010, “to expect to keep secret the general location of her main home.”
