Mum brought a tear to the eyes of the house on 06 07 09 when announcing Jennifer had her degree result but also stating that she’d be on the dole and unable to pay her student loan off. Well hats off this need not be a worry any more. Now all Nadine needs to do is work out where her main home is. Clue: It appears to be the one that you call your second home in Woburn as you spend very little time anywhere that could possibly be considered “main”.

http://bit.ly/141m8H #OOHD #GoNads

http://sarabedford.com/blog/2009/10/an-over-inflated-sense-of-worth-from-our-favourite-mp/

She points out a Private Eye snippet:

Many thanks to all those readers who wrote in to point out that Nadine Dorries’s children were until recently classmates at Ampleforth College with the children of one Trish Morris. As fellow parents Trish and Nadine got to know each other rather well. And who is Trish? Under her more formal moniker of Baroness Morris, she is vice-chairman of the Conservative party in charge of candidate selection!

So basically it appears she got her safe seat because of who she knows.

or to put it another way, I bet you can’t find a single MP that has more legitimate credentials. Any party.

Contrast this with her blogpost on her expenses claims, where she presents herself as a single mum struggling to make ends meet:

In fact, to date, I have spent almost £2000 of my own money this year entertaining constituents in the House of Commons. As a single mum with a number of dependents and responsibilities, that is money I have struggled to afford.

As if someone earning £65K a year can’t find £500 a year to do her job. If she also has made substantial amounts from her divorce settlement, this makes her comments even more cynical.

After she was chosen at the weekend, members discovered from journalists that it had been widely reported in 2006 that she had been involved in an affair between 2004 and 2005 with Mr Field, MP for the Cities of London and Westminster.

On the ball in Norfolk I see.

“A Conservative parliamentary candidate is facing a deselection vote later over an affair she had with a Tory MP more than four years ago.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8327362.stm

The counterparty was reportedly divorced and has since remarried someone else. I know of no news reporting constituency pressure for his deselection.

Roll on family values.

One of the reasons I have such fondness for the brilliant Tim Ireland is his regular and sharp taking apart of that awful politician.

Cheers UK Liberty for the Dunning Kruger thing – absolutely spot on.

she apparently had to attend that year’s Tory conference in limbo, which seems to me to be the perfect venue for a Tory conference

I always thought that Limbo sounded rather nice. All the best chaps hanging out there, Virgil, Homer, Horace and so on. Aristotle, Julius Caesar.

We came to the foot of a noble castle, encircled seven times by towering walls, defended round about by a fair stream. Over this stream we moved as on dry land. Through seven gates I entered with these sages until we came to a fresh, green meadow.

Sounds all right really.

Unlike that sign I saw over the Conference Hall in Brighton for Brown’s speech…

“Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente

Agree with you on Dorries by the way. Not one of our ornaments.

Thanks for this, and for the link. Good digging.

The issue of whether there were 7 women on a shortlist of 12, or 5 on a shortlist of 19 is a matter of fact. The Times report was contemporary and impartial, so sounds convincing to me. It does cast some further doubt as to whether all of ND’s public statements always stack up factually when scrutinised.

However, in either scenario Dorries did well to be selected. I would think it fine for CCHQ to be trying to level the playing field, given how women were being selected at a very low rate in 2005. I bet she pitched well to the Bedford selectorate.

While Dorries’ views of meritocracy are weak, and her account of her history selective, she surely has every right to be proud of becoming an MP.

But I do think she misses the point that AWS selections are also rather competitive. I thought it was pretty shocking when her ConHome piece stated she would not be proud if her daughter get into Parliament, if it was via AWS. Statements like ‘they are in parliament purely because of their gender’ are absurd.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by AlexJThomas: RT @libcon: Article:: No, No, Nadine http://bit.ly/LBvWZ #GoNads…

Life’s hard when you’re chasing ambulances in a call centre.