Nadine Dorries resigns: Labour and Lib Dems gear up for by-election battle

Labour and the Liberal Democrats are vying to snap up Nadine Dorries’ seat in a by-election this autumn, triggered after she quit on Saturday.

The two parties ruled out any election pact as they look to contest the vacated Mid Bedfordshire seat.

In her blistering resignation letter, Ms Dorries accused Rishi Sunak of running a “zombie Parliament”.

Government minister Johnny Mercer dismissed her scathing criticism, but said she was “entitled to that view”.

“I think people are tired of raking over the coals of the Boris Johnson government,” said Mr Mercer, who is the government’s veteran affairs minister.

He told reporters on Sunday that he looked forward to the by-election campaign, but the Conservative Party would have to “work hard to get” constituents’ votes, adding: “We’ve got work to do but we’ve got a good candidate.”

Ms Dorries – who was a Johnson loyalist – announced she would stand down on Saturday evening, 11 weeks after originally pledging to quit “with immediate effect” on 9 June.

Labour’s Anneliese Dodds said Ms Dorries’ resignation was “a real relief for the people of Mid Bedfordshire” and that Labour was in “pole position” for the seat, despite not winning there before.

“I think it really is all to play for for Labour with this by-election,” she told BBC Breakfast. “They desperately need an MP who will be focused on them full-time.”

She added that “Labour won’t be cooking up any deals”.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said he was “increasingly confident we have a really good chance” of overturning Ms Dorries’ huge 25,000 majority in the constituency, following the party’s victory in Somerton and Frome last month.

He said the Lib Dems had already been campaigning there, adding: “It’s clear that the people of Mid Bedfordshire feel the Conservative Party is out of trust and they see the Liberal Democrats as the main challenger.”

Ms Dorries, whose salary as an MP is £86,584, had come under increasing pressure to act on her promise to resign, as she had not spoken in the Commons since June 2022.

She submitted her resignation letter to the prime minister and published the eviscerating text on Mail Online.

Senior Tory Caroline Nokes was left unimpressed by her remarks, telling BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House: “I am not planning on wasting a second more of my life thinking about Nadine Dorries.

“Nadine has turned her resignation into a psychodrama and sadly this seems more about gathering column inches for Nadine rather than a Conservative Party she claimed to be a loyal member of a few weeks ago.”

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is expected to appoint Ms Dorries to the historical position of Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern on Tuesday – the arcane mechanism by which MPs can leave the Commons before an election.

This will enable the Conservative Party to call a by-election in Mid Bedfordshire.

Blake Stephenson, the chair of the Mid Bedfordshire Conservatives, told the BBC constituents had been “looking for clarity” over Ms Dorries.

“I’m certain that [the Conservative candidate] can win this campaign,” he said. “But the circumstances in which we go into this by-election do make that more tricky.”

Despite saying in June that she would quit with immediate effect, Ms Dorries subsequently said she wanted to find out why she was refused a seat in the House of Lords.

It was widely thought she would be made a peer by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his resignation honours list.

In a lengthy statement Ms Dorries accused Mr Sunak of “demeaning his office by opening the gates to whip up a public frenzy” against her.

This, she said, resulted in “the police having to visit my home and contact me on a number of occasions due to threats to my person”.

In a criticism of Mr Sunak’s leadership, she said: “Since you took office a year ago, the country is run by a zombie Parliament where nothing meaningful has happened.

“You have no mandate from the people and the government is adrift. You have squandered the goodwill of the nation, for what?”

She continued: “It is a fact that there is no affection for [Labour leader] Keir Starmer out on the doorstep. He does not have the winning X factor qualities of a Thatcher, Blair or a Boris Johnson, and sadly, prime minister, neither do you.”

Born in Liverpool, the mother of three says her childhood was warm and loving but she told the Guardian she also remembers having to “hide from the rent man as we couldn’t pay him. Some days there would be no food.”

After school she trained as a nurse and her profession frequently informed the political issues she took up – from Group B Strep testing for pregnant women to pushing for the time limit on abortions to be reduced.

She came late to politics and had considered joining Labour, but her views were swung by the Right to Buy scheme which had allowed her mother to buy her council house.

Ms Dorries was elected MP for Mid Bedfordshire in 2005, although her decision to go on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here in 2012 led to her suspension from the parliamentary Conservative party.

She would later serve as a health minister before being appointed to the cabinet in 2021 when Boris Johnson made her culture secretary.

Having written a series of novels, her latest book The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson is due out in September.