The strange case of the anti-abortion knobhead and her racist chums

"I'm looking at you funny cos I am a bit funny"

Nadine Dorries is the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire. She’s a corrupt liar. She’s one of the greatest threats to reproductive rights in the UK through her attempts to get parliament to reduce the term limit for abortion. And she also exploits the very real problem of stalking and abuse to try and avoid criticism – in fact she doesn’t like people looking into her activities as an elected representative one little bit.

Nadine has been in the news this week because of a public spat with blogger Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads. He and some others have been working to document the frequent lies she tells and her flagrant corruption. She has responded by accusing him of being a stalker, but also by admitting that what she writes on her own blog is “70% fiction.”

Nadine was criticised in a Commons report last week for using her blog to try and make it look as if she was living primarily in her constituency, and lying to her constituents about how much time she was spending locally. She had been under investigation for her expenses claims, because she was claiming for her home in Bedfordshire as a second home, meaning she got about £24 grand from the public purse for it. But she was cleared of wrongdoing because although she wasn’t staying mainly in London, she also wasn’t staying in Bedfordshire – she actually lives in the picturesque Cotswolds in Gloucestershire!

Defending her lies on her blog about where she was at any particular time, she said:

“My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”

She has previously attacked the media for “bullying” MPs over the expenses scandal (God forbid that journalists would look into how they’re spending our money!), famously saying on her blog that MPs were all checking up on each other because “everyone was fearing a suicide” (a post she later deleted when she realised how bad it made her look.) She again developed this theme to account for her blog lying:

“In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.”

Reassure them by lying?

She also went on to claim that she had been lying about her whereabouts to conceal them from the aforementioned blogging “stalker” Tim Ireland. However, the lies on her blog date back to before Ireland had even taken any interest her, and yet again she is trying to make herself look like a victim when she has been uncovered doing wrong, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention.

The story of how she came to be targeting Ireland is a complicated one, that he explains in full on his blog. However, it dates back to some investigative journalism he did that exposed some of the extremely dodgy activities of a group of Tory MPs and their associates. In January last year, he uncovered that a man called Glen Jenvey, a professional associate of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer (who btw is chair of the Commons sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism), was going round the internet pretending to be an Islamic extremist. His aim was to create tabloid headlines and whip up anti-Muslim racism, based on lies.

When Ireland exposed this, he made himself a target for the Tory lie machine, who got hold of his (ex-directory) home address and started publishing it around the internet claiming he was a convicted paedophile and in league with Islamic terrorists. They handed this information to people who they thought were hostile, including members of the BNP. When Ireland began contacting Tory MPs to demand this stopped, they began the story that he was an “electronic stalker” who was bombarding them with emails and phone calls. This is a real misrepresentation of what happened, and I know if I was in his shoes I would be going considerably more ape shit than he appears to have done. From this however emerged the allegation that he was stalking a number of MPs, including Nadine Dorries.

One of the main people responsible for the attacks, a man called Charlie Flowers, said he was acting on behalf of Nadine Dorries. When this was brought to her attention, she claimed she had taken action (another lie) and then claimed she had reported Ireland to the police for stalking.

Ireland has responded to the allegation by asking for any evidence of the abusive emails she claims he sent, or even any evidence she has spoken to the police, as he has had no contact from them. She can’t even produce a crime number for her supposed report because it’s bollocks. Since then the cabal of Tory liars of which she has part have also initiated false allegations against Ireland’s children that they were guilty of criminal damage.

When a constituent tried to challenge Nadine on her smearing of Tim Ireland, she went on to launch a venomous attack against her as well. The woman in question blogs and tweets as Humphrey Cushion, and also has arthritis meaning she has had to give up her job as a carer temporarily while she waits for a foot operation. She does not qualify for benefits for disability, however, Dorries and chums decided to go all out describing her as a “benefits cheat”.

“Do you know of anyone else who has Tweeted more than 35,000 times in less than six months? If so, email my office and let me know. Or, better still, if it’s someone you know is on benefits, contact the DWP . . .

Twitter all day, every day about claiming disability benefit in one tweet whist arranging a night out in the pub in the next. If you tweet about claiming six months rent from the social fund whilst tweeting how bad your hangover is . . . then don’t expect someone like me not to a) inform the authorities and b) tell you to get off your Twitter and get a job.”

The hand of hope - on Snopes and everything

All this bizarre behaviour shouldn’t surprise us given some of Nadine’s wackier political outbursts. She’s most well known for her attempts to lower the abortion term limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, based on totally made up science and yet more lies. In the last parliament she put a private member’s bill up, which was defeated. In the debate she lied that polls show that 75% of women back her position (the real figure is 15% and only when it’s fed to them as an option.)

She also repeated the ‘hand of hope’ hoax. This is a photo that was taken during surgery on a fetus that it was claimed showed it reaching out to hold the surgeon’s finger, proof, claim anti-abortionists, that fetuses are fully formed little people and killing them is murder. Except it’s bollocks, the surgeon says what happened is he accidentally pulled the hand out of the womb, after which he tucked it back in. It’s an anti-abortion urban legend – it’s on Snopes and everything. (She does back up her scientific credentials however by being one of the MPs that backs homeopathic hospitals becoming part of the NHS.)

She also campaigned against what she claimed was an attempt by unions to “ban high heels at work.” The origin of the story was that the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists had submitted a motion to the Trades Union Congress asking employers (many of whom force women to wear high heels as part of a dress code) to consider the serious ill health wearing them all day can cause to the feet, legs and back. No call to ban, but that didn’t stop Nadine from smearing this perfectly sensible appeal as political correctness gone mad.

It's political incorrectness (lying) gone MAAAD!

And then there’s Channel 4 documentary, Tower Block of Commons, in which MPs were invited to live for a couple of days with people on welfare. Nadine took part, and managed to alienate the women she was staying with so much they set up a Twitter page called ‘I hate MPs’. They claim that she’d hidden 50 quid in her bra to avoid the reality of living on their income, and that she offered them temazepam!

“South Acton hates Nadine ­Dorries. Get her off the estate . . . Nadine Dorries is a lying two-faced bitch. I know first-hand,” they wrote.

All in all, Nadine is a bit of a train wreck of an MP, and if she was under proper media scrutiny rather than individuals on the internet being left to expose her she would have been forced to resign. Apart from being comedic in how much she lies, it’s good to read up on her as a cautionary tale as what we are up against in the Tories. And when it comes to the investigation that sparked all the trouble for Tim Ireland, it’s yet another warning that if we want to counter the politics of the SDL/EDL and the BNP, we should understand that the lies they tell about Islam and Muslims don’t just originate with them, but as much with members of UKIP, Labour and the Tories as well. In this case, there was in fact direct collusion with the BNP to promote a shared agenda.

Bonus: Check out the dedicated blog, The Nadine Dorries project.