Nadine Dorries - Petty And Bullying

Press regulator IPSO has concluded its deliberations on what has good claim to be the most pointless complaint yet brought to its attention: in a press release delayed until after the General Election, the body has set out why the complaint raised in what is prosaically titled “02473-15 Dorries v Bedfordshire on Sunday” was not upheld. And it reveals much about one politician’s mindset, and apparent sense of entitlement.

As might have been deduced, this concerned (yes, it’s her again) Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire Nadine Dorries, who took grave exception to a piece in Bedfordshire On Sunday. The heinous crime against Herself Personally Now was to profile all the candidates standing in the constituency that she was defending. The article was factually correct - but that was not good enough for the Fragrant Nadine.

This is because among those candidates was the serially tenacious Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads fame, who stood as an independent candidate. He has been a persistent critic of Ms Dorries, and especially her occasional ability to say things that are not factually correct. He was entitled to stand against her; this he did. But Ms Dorries could not, despite Mid Bedfordshire being a safe Tory seat, just allow this to happen.

So began what gave every appearance of being a campaign of orchestrated harassment. Although she did not attend the hustings event at Shefford, two of Ms Dorries’ daughters managed to fetch up there, and with a number of upstanding Tory luminaries, contrived to disrupt proceedings. A deeply dishonest flyer was handed out. All this has been detailed by the highly sound Ms Humphrey Cushion HERE.

It got worse: a feature in the Sunday Mirror, confirming that Ms Dorries’ last complaint to Bedfordshire Police against Ireland was closed as it was concluded he was doing nothing wrong, and merely holding her to account, was withdrawn from the paper’s website after she had her lawyers lean on the paper (those novels must be generating plenty of the old folding stuff, it seems). And then came the IPSO complaint.

This was petty in the extreme: Ireland, she asserted, could not be described as “from Harlington”, because he was from Australia (he lives in Harlington, and of course Ms Dorries cold not by that logic be described as from any part of the constituency, as she is from Liverpool). She took issue with the description of his occupation. She claimed the Police had issued him with some kind of warning.

And there was an eyebrow-raising coda: “while he may spend time in the village, he did not own or lease any property within the area”. How would she know that? Who is the one who is obsessively pursuing whom? Nadine Dorries portrays herself as the powerless victim, but in reality she is the one determined to pursue her critic with apparently vindictive relish, backed up by expensive lawyers and her sycophantic press pals.

IPSO threw out her complaint. On this occasion, they were absolutely right so to do.