Nadine Dorries stars in V for Vacuous Vendetta.

When Nadine Dorries isn’t busy doing her important work as a Member of Parliament; appearing on reality TV shows, hiring family members, stuffing her bra with fifties, patronizing the working classes, insulting single families, making dodgy expenses claims, blocking people on twitter, mistaking people’s identities etc etc she takes to her (unattractive and annoying to navigate) blog to give her extraordinary and intelligent political insights*

*Read – continues her strange personal vendetta against the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow and his wife, Sally Bercow, Labour Candidate for Westminster City Council and also writes about things she overheard whilst on the loo.

In this offering on the 1st Feb entitled Backs Against the Wall (a phrase you only usually hear shouted by homophobic people attempting to be humorous) Nadine boldly details her latest slight against the Speaker. Apparently, according to Nads (not according to many others), tradition dictates that when one encounters the Speaker approaching in the corridors of Parliament one must immediately step aside, with their back to the wall and avert their eyes in a suitably subordinate and respectful fashion (you’ll notice I’ve phrased this more colourfully than Nadine, her prose lack flair ). Nadine decided “to hell with tradition” and instead, in her own words:

When the Speaker came into the corridor the other night, I kept on walking. I even smiled and said good evening to the Mace bearer, who looked so shocked I thought he was going to drop the Mace.

Hmm, quite, shame he didn’t hit her with it really… anyway…

This incensed the Speaker, who I heard turn and complain, in a very loud voice, about what I had just done. I caught the word ‘she’ repetitively and loudly.

Hardly surprising, I’d be incensed if I saw Nadine coming at me aswell.

What, might you ask, was the reasoning behind Nadine’s rebellion, well we are elucidated in the next paragraph,

if you want to drop the tradition of wearing the Speaker’s dress, then don’t expect me to honour the tradition of standing still in the corridor when you move along it. You don’t pick and choose traditions. If you do you begin to erode away at what brings millions of pounds into this country each year via our tourism economy. You erode the authority of the Speaker’s chair and, by doing so, erode the authority of Parliament itself.

The short answer, ‘Well John won’t wear the flowing robe so I won’t put my back against a wall, why should I follow the rules if he doesn’t wah wah’. An excuse worthy of a school child trying to get their way out of trouble, ‘Well John pinched me first so I didn’t think it was wrong to pinch him back’. Her argument quickly falls down with her lines on tourism. If she so badly wants to keep the authority of Parliament and keep the traditions that she feels fuel tourism then why is she, herself, dropping traditions on a whim? That hardly bolsters her argument. Besides I don’t think the nations tourism takings are going to be alarmingly down because the Speaker has a slightly modern robe (it’s still a robe after all, it’s not like he’s addressing the house in a track suit and trainers).

Of course her sudden concern for the traditions of Parliament would seem more sincere if it wasn’t for the fact that Nadine has regularly spouted forth her dislike for the Speaker through various media organs (and the fact she happily sacrificed a tradition just to annoy the Speaker).  Nadine has ardently campaigned against John Bercow since Michael Martin was unceremoniously ousted after his failures in dealing with the expenses scandal. Nadine declared last year,

I shall make my commitment to guarantee, by any means at my disposal, that should John Bercow become Speaker, I will do my best to make sure that it is the one of the shortest served appointments in the grand, and glorious history of that coveted chair.

Nadine’s ‘commitment’ to her hate campaign, designed to assure ‘one of the shortest served appointments’ seems to be mainly spouting forth blogs (such as the one discussed) and Tweets against the Speaker, his wife and his decision-making. The best/worst outburst so far was when she criticised John Bercow for “ALLOWING” his wife to do an interview she objected to. That’s “allowing” if you missed it. In Nadine’s feminism the wife has to ask the husband before she is allowed to do something like give an interview. Fortunately I don’t think many people, outside of Nadine’s nest, feel the same way about the Speaker or his wife (I personally love the way he says “O-o-o-ORDER” during Prime Ministers Questions).

Interestingly Nadine’s entire blog may actually be more fictional than she would have us believe, as Labour MP Martin Salter wrote in The Telegraph, ‘In reality, there was not much more than a bit of glaring on both sides.’ This kind of delusional fantasy is a habit of Nadine’s though (I have personal experience of this) so I think the lesson is take whatever Nadine says with a healthy pinch of salt and move on and remember that anything she says about the Speaker and his wife is based on nothing more than odd, misplaced, personal animosity.

Thought of the day: why are CCHQ allegedly monitoring and instructing Twitter users when Nadine is on the loose?

So glad I’m not a constituent in Mid Bedfordshire…