There have been 13 culture secretaries in the past 14 years. Most came and went without troubling the attention of even close followers of politics. Who, after all, remembers Matt Hancock’s brief stint three years ago? Or what about (or perhaps, who is) Jeremy Wright? Or Baroness Morgan of Cotes? Public indifference, however, is unlikely to be the response to the woman who last month was made secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport.
Nadine Dorries is by almost universal agreement a “character”. Whether it’s a good or bad character seems to be a secondary issue to the fact that she is forthright and reliably quotable. She’s someone who is known for speaking her mind, and then changing it, for her moral stands and political falls, for her down-to-earth charm and long-running feuds. More than anything she is defined in the public imagination by her participation, as a sitting MP, in 2012’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
She didn’t last long in the reality TV show. Despite being among a group of contestants that included the likes of the former darts world champion Eric Bristow and Limahl, the onetime lead vocalist for Kajagoogoo, she was the first contestant to be voted out. But in the process she certainly made a name for herself, first by temporarily having the Conservative party whip withdrawn as punishment for abandoning her constituents, and then by consuming a lamb’s testicle and an ostrich’s anus to win a Bushtucker Trial.
As the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, tweeted when, out of nowhere, Boris Johnson awarded Dorries the culture job: “Who would have thought there would have been a culture secretary who had been in the TV jungle?”
When Dorries returned from Murwillumbah in Australia, she showed less appetite for eating humble pie than she had for the ostrich’s backside. She defiantly insisted that her only aim had been to make politics accessible to the public at large. It was an unapologetic stance that angered her fellow MPs, still reeling from the expenses scandal of 2009, and led to a period of extreme marginalisation.
“It was appalling,” says one former Tory colleague. “It was just about fame and putting more money in the bank. She made herself look stupid and it did not reflect well on MPs in general.” Dorries’s friend Stewart Jackson, the former Conservative MP for Peterborough, recalls being shouted down at a meeting of backbench Tory MPs for suggesting that public condemnation of Dorries was counterproductive. “They were vitriolic,” he recalls.
That Dorries was able to return from that kind of setback, albeit self-inflicted, no doubt speaks of her resilience. But her promotion to culture secretary may have more to do with a new political reality in a post-Trump, post-Johnson world. Trump became president of the United States on the strength of being a reality-TV star, whereas Johnson became prime minister of the United Kingdom owing to a personality-based popularity that transcended traditional politics.
In an age of populism and cultural posturing, a proven track record of competence is perhaps less valued than an established reputation for snatching attention. And there is unquestionably something performative about the way Dorries goes about politics, almost self-consciously shooting from the hip, ruffling feathers, letting the media know she’s around. So it was that she began the job by telling an event at the Conservative party conference that the BBC might not be here in 10 years’ time – a comment that was guaranteed to grab headlines.
In her new post, of course, Dorries is responsible for overseeing discussions between the government and the BBC on the future of the licence fee. During that party conference the BBC’s Nick Robinson told an evasive Boris Johnson to “stop talking” in a testy interview on Radio 4’s Today programme. Last week it was reported that Dorries, a staunch Johnsonite with a Sicilian memory for slights, told allies that “Nick Robinson has cost the BBC a lot of money”.
Such threats and briefings are not unheard of from cabinet ministers trying to gain an upper hand in negotiations. However, the tensions between the BBC and the government are palpably not just budgetary, but also emblematic of a wider cultural conflict. This is an ongoing argument about symbols, identity, flags, statues and gestures that is amplified by discrete and antagonistic groups on social media.
In this battle, which tends to pit conservative, provincial and Brexiteer forces against the so-called metropolitan liberal Europhile establishment, Dorries’s role is not that of a strategising general so much as a voluble figure to rouse the troops.
The daughter of a lift operator, Dorries has had plenty of experience of struggles. Born in Liverpool, she grew up on a council estate in Runcorn, and has described how her family used to hide from the rent man because they had no money to pay him. She also said that on “some days there would be no food.”
Her father died early in her nursing career, and when she met her husband, Paul Dorries, a mining engineer who became a financial adviser, she left the north-west. The couple spent a year in Zambia in the mid-1980s, where he ran a copper mine and Dorries was head of a community school. It was on her return that she founded Company Kids Ltd, a child day-care service for working parents.
“She saw a business opportunity with social care before a lot of people saw it as an area of interest,” says Jackson.
She sold the business to Bupa, the private healthcare company, in 1998, and it was then that she set her sights on politics. Having stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative candidate for Hazel Grove at the 2001 general election, she was selected for the safe seat of Mid-Bedfordshire in 2005.
The circumstances of this selection are disputed: Dorries has since claimed that the candidate shortlist was made up mostly of men, whereas contemporary reports say it was largely women. This is noteworthy because, before she was selected, Dorries advocated all-women shortlists, but after her election she criticised David Cameron when he floated the idea of using them.
Changing her mind has been a feature of Dorries’s political career. She argued and voted against gay marriage, for example, dismissing it as a policy pursued “by the metro elite gay activists”. She has since said that her opposition to the gay marriage bill was her “biggest regret”.
She once claimed that a political blog she kept was “70% fiction”, after the MPs standards watchdog criticised it for potentially misleading constituents about how much time she spent in her constituency. A week later she stated that the blog was accurate. There is perhaps an element of the unreliable narrator about the part-time novelist.
Another charge is that she maintains double standards. In her conference attack on the BBC, she claimed that it was full of people “whose mum and dad worked there”. But in 2013 she faced criticism for employing two of her three daughters as staff in her parliamentary office at a cost of around £80,000. To the accusation of nepotism there was now added one of rank hypocrisy.
“She often speaks without thinking,” says one Tory MP. “She’s a maverick who is better suited to life as a constituency MP, not a government minister.”
Others suggest that what critics see as impulsiveness is a refusal to conform to establishment rules. “Boris must have thought he was getting two for one [with Dorries’s appointment],” says Jackson, “a loyal and diligent cabinet minister, and it will also irritate all the right people.”
For a former culture secretary, Andy Burnham, now mayor of Greater Manchester, this kind of attritional thinking is precisely the worry. Like many people, he finds Dorries personable company and says the job needs a character. “When I did it,” he asks, “when Stephen Dorrell and James Purnell did it, were we big enough characters? Probably not, I think, for people in that world.”
There is a difference, though, between being a character and having or showing character. Dorries clearly doesn’t lack courage. The question mark, as with Johnson himself, is over her judgment and integrity.
“Nadine gets herself noticed,” says Burnham, “but if it becomes a thing that the culture secretary fights culture wars, then I think the job is in serious trouble. When I heard her [conference] comments, I thought, here we go, a BBC-bashing culture secretary.”
Burnham believes that the job is distinctly different from other cabinet positions. What sets it apart, he says, is that its areas of responsibility are “the best things about the country” and therefore arouse great passions in people. “You really need to show you understand that,” he says, “by really taking a proper interest in what they do.”
If Dorries is to make a success of the job, he says, she will have to show a side of her personality she hasn’t shown before. She has to be able to show that she’s “prepared to change and engage” with the different worlds with which she’ll be dealing.
Last year marked an upturn in Dorries’s political career, although it didn’t begin promisingly. In March 2020 she became the first MP diagnosed with Covid-19, suffering what she called a “severe dose”. But two months later she was promoted from junior health minister to minister of state for patient safety, suicide prevention and mental health. Stewart Jackson says that for years before she had been used unofficially by the whip’s office to help MPs who were suffering from depression. He claims that she intervened to save one suicidal MP’s life. “She’s an unsung hero,” he says.
Three days after her promotion she retweeted a doctored video from a far-right Twitter account that falsely claimed Keir Starmer had obstructed the prosecution of grooming gangs when he was DPP. She also added a comment: “Revealing”. Then in November she rejected an offer of cross-party talks on a mental health support package for frontline NHS staff. Although both decisions drew protest, the department of health was almost entirely taken up with the challenge of Covid, and Dorries’s performance went largely unnoticed. Few of her fiercest critics or supporters seem able to say how she fared, other than that she managed to avoid any major embarrassments.
The step up to the department of DCMS was not an obvious promotion, but it followed a certain logic. If her main claim to the health job had been her experience as a nurse, then culture was justified by the fact that she writes novels – not the kind that make it to the Booker shortlist, but ones with titles like The Angels of Lovely Lane and The Velvet Ribbon.
She says she writes 1,000 words per hour. Works of high modernism they may not be – the Daily Telegraph critic called one of her books “the worst novel I have read in 10 years” – but they are said to have sold 2.4 million copies.
Jackson is adamant that she is a victim of snobbery. “All the people who most loathe her in their snooty metropolitan elitist way,” he says, “totally disregard the fact that she’s one of the most successful writers ever to sit in the House of Commons.”
Well, yes, but another Tory “character”, Jeffrey Archer, whose novels were also routinely pilloried for their clunky writing, has sold over a hundred times more books than Dorries.
If Dorries does have a political agenda, beyond sticking it to snooty metropolitans, it’s gaining access to the arts and media for what she believes are neglected constituencies – namely the white working class, the provinces and the north. It was reported last week that she told the BBC director general that she wanted to see an “access plan” that would extend the focus on race and sexuality to class and gender.
One longtime Dorries-watcher is Sasha Swire, the author of last year’s must-read political gossip book, Diary of an MP’s Wife, in which she refers to her as “Mad Nad” – a coinage she insists was not her own. Although Swire’s husband has clashed with Dorries, she sees positives in her appointment.
“I think it’s quite high risk putting her in that job,” she says. “But I applaud Boris for giving it a go. She comes from a working-class background, and she’s been a nurse. That brings a level of truth to the job. Most people don’t go to the Royal Opera House or Sadler’s Wells. Most of the arts exist in the provinces. And if she champions that, that’s good.”
As far as Swire is concerned, Dorries is not really a cultural warrior but a “class warrior”. It’s a judgment that seems to be based largely on her comments, some months prior to the I’m A Celebrity excursion, about David Cameron and his then chancellor George Osborne. She referred to them as “two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk – who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others.”
None of which tallies with her devoted loyalty to Cameron’s fellow ex-member of the Bullingdon Club, Boris Johnson. Swire records in her diary Dorries being in tears when Johnson withdrew from the leadership contest in 2016. Thus far her political prospects have been inextricably tied to his progress.
“She’s always been a fanatical follower of Boris. Slavish almost, which is ironic,” Swire acknowledges, “since he went to Eton.”
Paul Goodman, the editor of the influential website Conservative Home, thinks the key to Dorries’s appointment is less her willingness to engage in cultural warfare than an acknowledgment of her loyalty.
“Johnson is indifferent to culture wars but enjoys upsetting apple carts,” he says. “Of which her promotion is another example. She will have been promoted because she is a Johnson loyalist – and because he sees her as a splash of colour amidst a grey landscape.”
They may come from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but Johnson and Dorries have both been subject to unwanted press attention regarding their eventful personal lives. An affair with a friend’s husband got the tabloid treatment following I’m A Celebrity… But as with much else, Dorries shook it off and the following year signed a three-book deal for a six-figure advance.
Jackson believes she is not only underestimated but widely misunderstood.
“People forget she nursed her divorced husband,” he says. “He had multiple sclerosis and in the last year of his life she took care of him in her home. She’s brought up her three daughters very successfully as professional women, and she’s taken good care of her elderly mother.”
While Jackson portrays his friend as a cross between Florence Nightingale and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, others maintain that there’s a sliver of ice in that heart of gold. “Nadine does have fun,” says Anna Soubry, the arch-remainer who left the Conservative party to join the ill-fated Independent Group, later Change UK, “but there’s a complexity to her character.”
Soubry cites an occasion after the European referendum in 2016 in which she (Soubry) gave an impromptu speech to a remainer demonstration on College Green, which went viral. Earlier that evening she’d seen Dorries outside the Smoking Room bar in the House of Commons. Soubry, who had an upset stomach, wasn’t drinking, but Dorries later wrote a tweet suggeting that Soubry had had too much to drink.
Soubry says she replied stating that it wasn’t true, and asked Norries to delete the tweet. According to Soubry, she declined to do so, even after she was threatened with legal action.
“She finally and randomly deleted the tweet and apologised more than a year later,” says Soubry. “People talk about the death threats and abuse, but actually that was one of the worst things that ever happened to me as an MP. It really upset me.”
Ironically, it is now Dorries, who has written in the past of her own experiences of online abuse, who is responsible for dealing with regulating social media in the online safety bill that she has inherited. “Digital” only became part of the DCMS’s title four years ago, but it’s no coincidence that it is first on the list.
Although the spat with the BBC garners media attention because it plays into a familiar narrative of “philistines” versus “luvvies”, it may well be the reform of US-owned social media platforms that presents Dorries with her greatest challenge.
The draft bill, currently undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny, has come under criticism from the wellbeing charity Carnegie UK for offering “exceptional powers” to the culture secretary to interfere with Ofcom’s independence. The draft has also been criticised for watering down recommendations to prevent the proliferation of disinformation online. Yet another concern is that Ofcom will be placed in the position of being a huge online moderator.
Last week it was confirmed that Paul Dacre will be given another chance to become chair of the regulator, despite being rejected by an Ofcom interview panel that declared him “not appointable”. The final decision on whether the former Daily Mail editor becomes the moderator-in-chief will be taken, in consultation with Downing Street, by Dorries.
Will she be up to the task of balancing freedom of speech against protection of individuals and the marketplace of ideas against corporate degradation of democracy? She’s a celebrity… Now can she do the job?
“I wouldn’t suggest that competence is currently a key requirement of being a minister or cabinet minister,” says one disillusioned Tory MP. “And there will be a question mark about whether she would have the knowledge or skill to oversee a bill.”
Burnham believes that if she knows what she’s after, Dorries will be able to make a difference.
“It’s all about what people make of ministerial jobs,” he says. “If she chooses to take on some of these forces, she’ll be able to do something.”
Although there has been a high turnover of culture secretaries, there are some who have made an impact. Tessa Jowell, who lasted six years, was one. According to Burnham, though, it was Chris Smith, when he was called secretary for national heritage, who turned the job into a worthy cabinet position. Burnham was his adviser at the time.
“He did a very important thing that often gets missed,” he says. “He drew up a mapping document of the creative industries and said that it now needed to be talked about as a sector of the economy, like manufacturing. He brought a seriousness to the job. That ministry of fun image all of a sudden became a lot more substantial.”
Whether or not she’ll err on the side of “fun” in the shape of cultural war-games, Paul Goodman expects Dorries to make a mark at least on the issue of online safety.
“I’d be surprised if her experience of being abused, threatened and stalked on social media didn’t influence her approach to the bill,” he says.
Swire, who notes that Dorries has always been a “media tart”, advises that any politician in a cabinet role “should keep a low profile until you understand your brief.”
A number of possibilities present themselves. One is that Dorries will defy her critics’ expectations and manage to handle both the BBC’s licence-fee negotiations and the online safety bill with nuance and understanding. Another is that she’ll make a lot of enemies but achieve very little. But a third, and going on recent history, perhaps the most likely, is that she’ll be out of the job before she knows what it entails.
The average stay of culture secretaries over the past decade and a half has been little more than a year. Most cabinet ministers say that it takes that long just to grasp a ministry’s brief. No sober observer expects Dorries to keep a low profile in that time. But then, it must be said, none expected her to make it from the jungle to the cabinet.