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Be careful what you wish for. Danny Kruger was already looking very queasy when he sat at the back for the Reform press conference in which Nigel Farage revealed his plans for mass deportations of legal migrants. Then on Wednesday it fell to him to go on television to say that when Zia Yusuf had repeatedly said Keir Starmer was a terrorist who was plotting to kill Farage, he had actually meant something entirely different. Fair to say Danny probably isn’t living his best Reform life. It’s one thing to defect from the Tories. It’s another to be made to look a quarter-wit in the process.
Nadine Dorries, though, is another matter. She really is living the dream. Maybe it helps that she was never that bright in the first place but she is a woman of no regrets. Perfectly happy to live in the day. The past isn’t just another country, it’s a parallel universe. One where any inconsistencies and inconvenient truths are consigned to blissful oblivion. She is the unthinking woman’s unthinking woman. A danger to herself but a source of amusement to the rest of us.
We last saw Nad on the day of her defection at the Reform party conference in early September. There she had been brought on stage to introduce herself. Fair to say this was not one of her finest performances. She appeared – and there is no kind way of saying this – rambling and totally incoherent. So much so that Nige had to make an unscheduled appearance on stage to interrupt her and drag her away. Her final words were: “You’ll never take me alive.” Or something like that.
But Dorries is now back, giving an interview to Cathy Newman on Channel 4’s Fourcast podcast. And not a moment too soon. Politics has missed her incisive thinking and deranged conspiracy theories. We dived straight in with the accusations of racism. Nad nodded her head seriously. She had had time to consider Reform’s policies in great depth – always a warning sign when Nad says something like that – and come to the conclusion that Reform couldn’t be racist because everyone in Reform was too intelligent to be racist.
Newman pointed out that deporting people with a legal right to be here probably was racist. Now Nad went rogue. She had worked in the NHS and some of her best friends had been Filipinos and Reform wasn’t going to deport all of them – she might want to check this one out with Nige – but it was fine to chuck out all those who were here illegally, which made up for most hospital workers. At which point it slowly dawned on Cathy that Nadine didn’t seem to quite understand the difference between legal and illegal.
We moved on to the prime minister’s speech to the Labour conference. Here Nad went full Zia. It had definitely been an incitement to murder. Keir wanted Nige dead. Dan Brown had told her so, personally. Along with saying he thought she was the greatest living novelist. It was perfectly normal for the head of government to order executions on live TV. All of them had done that. Apart from her darling Boris. Nad didn’t seem to remember that Reform had publicly backed Lucy Connolly who actually had incited violence.
Now things became steadily more unhinged. Nige and Zia’s “Boriswave” had actually been a secret invention of Dominic Cummings. Yet another cog in the endless plot to bring down Boris. She knew this because she had had a conversation about it with Boris, though she couldn’t discuss any of her private conversations with her Bozzy bear. It was only a matter of time before she blamed Michael Gove.
“Why don’t people blame Rishi Sunak for the increase in immigration?” Dorries pleaded. Er … possibly because it all started under Boris. And come to think of it, why hadn’t Nadine said something about it when she was in Johnson’s cabinet? That was because no one had told her all these people were coming into the country and it hadn’t occurred to her to ask. She had been too busy enjoying the Brexit benefits of controlling our borders by letting 4.2 million people in. She demanded another moment’s silence for Boris. The finest PM to have ever lived.
Then the bombshell. “I’ve given my life to politics and I have a lot of wisdom,” she said. Something no one has ever said of Dorries. Or is ever likely too. There were dozens of Tory MPs queueing up to defect to Reform. But Nige was only interested in taking the very brightest and the best. People of the calibre of … Nadine. Who wouldn’t welcome someone this gifted?
There was just time for one more jewel. A searing insight. No one could possibly have guessed that Reform’s health policy consultant Aseem Malhotra would use his conference speech to blame the king’s cancer on the Covid jab, because it was not as if he had ever said anything like that before. Oh, he had. Reform took only the finest minds of their generation. And if a peerage were to come her way … She was getting ahead of herself. It’s only a matter of time. “I hate doing media,” Nad concluded. She hides it well.
If Nad was having a top day out, Mark Rowley, the head of the Met, was having one of his worst as he was made to do a series of interviews explaining away the latest exposé from the BBC’s Panorama programme. Rowley looked as if he would rather be almost anywhere else. Even spending an hour with Nadine. That bad.
It was like this. The Met wasn’t institutionally racist, misogynistic and violent, he said. It was just that the Beeb had managed to root out the five or six bad apples in the entire force. Everyone else was above reproach. People could have full confidence in the police. And no, he wasn’t going to resign. Because what would be the point? Whoever took over from him would only then have to resign the next time it happened. Then where would we be? Far better that no one took responsibility.
Would that do? It would have to.
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The Bonfire of the Insanities by John Crace (Guardian Faber Publishing, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
