A Scottish National party (SNP) MP has been cleared of bullying the former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries after a six-month investigation.
John Nicolson, the SNP’s culture secretary, is understood to have been cleared after parliament’s Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme (ICGS) assessed a series of tweets he made about Dorries while she was culture secretary in Boris Johnson’s cabinet.
He criticised Dorries, calling her “a horrible disgusting woman”, “a “mendacious, vacuous Tory goon” and “thick as two short planks”.
Nicolson liked the tweets posted by others after the pair engaged in a Commons select committee session, during which he questioned Dorries on her use of Twitter. After a number of exchanges during the digital, culture, media and sport committee hearing in November 2021, she said she was “not going to answer questions about tweets that I posted 12 years ago, or whenever it was”.
At one point, Nicolson said: “It is hard to keep track of your tweets”, to which Dorries replied: “Not as hard as it is to keep track of yours.”
The case was first reported by Politico UK. It marks the first case of a British politician being investigated by the ICGS over allegations of cyberbullying another MP. The ICGS was created in 2018 to get a grip on misconduct within parliament.
A House of Commons spokesperson said: “Parliament’s ICGS operates on the basis of confidentiality for the benefit of all parties. Therefore, we cannot provide any information on any complaint, including whether or not a complaint has been received.”
The SNP MP for Ochil and South Perthshire remains the subject of a separate investigation by the Commons privileges committee after he was accused of a “clear breach” of parliamentary rules for tweeting details of a letter from Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle.
Nicolson was forced to apologise after he posted part of a letter from Hoyle relating to his decision to not refer Dorries to the privileges committee after claims she had made misleading remarks on a Channel 4 programme.
Nicolson said he was “deeply sorry” that Sir Lindsay was upset and insisted there had been “no malicious intent” at the time.
The investigation regarding that incident is ongoing.
