Nadine Dorries Quits Twitter

Hard on the heels of Daily Mail pundit Sarah “Vain” Vine has come another departure from Twitter, making the same claims - that the social media offering is some kind of “sewer” teeming with abuse. This time, though, it was a politician making the exit, and no less a being than (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries, whose departure from Twitter many had hoped would have happened some years earlier.

The fragrant Nadine has spelt it out: “Twitter is a place where people lose their jobs, their dignity, their self-respect and, occasionally, their life”. Honesty and a sense of proportion do tend to elude some people. But do go on: “After almost ten years on Twitter (so long I can’t remember) and with 28,000 followers, I have made my own modest exit”. Modest, eh? That’ll be another of those Dorries honesty problems.

But she wants everyone to know that the problem is serious: “There are men who have spent almost ten years of their life obsessed with what I say on Twitter. I say men but, if they don’t have a blue tick against their name we have no idea who they really are. I imagine they’re sat in a bedroom in their mother’s house, hunched over a computer, tweeting their daily-misinformed comments and abuse. Encouraging others to tweet their own abuse and trying hard to whip up a Twitter storm against me”.

And on she goes: “Twitter has become a room in which the seriously unwell meet, create an echo chamber, set their own rules and plan attacks. They distort and manipulate and their objective is to destroy people”. Now, I hate to sound a note of dissent, but Ms Dorries is not exactly pure as the driven snow on this one.

Take, for starters, her attacks on Labour MP Steve McCabe over his attendance record after he had mentioned her I’m A Celebrity jaunt: even after she had been told he was recuperating from open heart surgery she taunted him, sniping “I think with your 65% attendance record you should be quiet. Obviously been taking a few holidays of your own!” In another Tweet, she revealed the address of constituent Philip Hickling.

And that was as nothing to the abuse she doled out to the Sunday Mirror after the Ramona Ladin story broke (see HERE, HERE and HERE). After suggesting that Peter Oborne, not her greatest admirer, was a “drunk reporter”, she accused Ben Glaze of the SM of “stalker esque” [sic] behaviour, before threatening to nail his testicles to the floor with his own teeth. This was a mere precursor to a later full-scale meltdown.

After calling the SM’s Nick Owens “Scum” (twice), there was a doubling down on the testicle-nailing threat. Compared to all that, her Twitter endorsement of a Spectator blog with her dishonest claims that Liverpool had “eight Tory MPs and an all-Tory council” when she was growing up is comparatively mild, but just serves to reinforce the impression that the fragrant Nadine is standing in an awfully draughty glasshouse.

So farewell then Nadine Dorries. Don’t let the Twitter door hit you on the way out.