Clash of the Bright uns... Nadine Dorries versus Rachel Johnson

It's Monday morning and there's an awful lot happening in the U.K. this week, from rail strikes to critical by elections, and not overlooking the #CarrieGate story, or Schrodinger's scandal as would be more accurate after Simon Walters revealed in the Times over the weekend that in 2018 Boris Johnson tried to recruit his then mistress, Carrie Symonds to a 100k a year advisory role reporting to him as Foreign Secretary while his wife underwent treatment for cervical cancer, only for the story to be pulled from the Times second edition, and then to disappear from the Daily Mail online. Whilst this isn't on today's menu for a deeper dive, it was of course a topic that Rachel Johnson avoided raising with Nadine Dorries during last night's LBC 'third summer of love' style interview should anybody have taken time out of their Sunday evening to endure an hour of two women pretty much stroking Boris's thighs while dropping numerous toxic hand grenades at the feet of anyone who may have dared try and hinder Operation Save Big Dog... I took that hour out of my Sunday evening! Well, strictly speaking I recorded it and watched it with a 15 minute delay to allow for fury, note taking, and at one point even, a cannabis break out of sheer weariness from gesticulating apelike in the direction of my tv, and there was eye rolling... lots of eye rolling, and cursing, which I tend to do more and more these days when listening to LBC on any slot other than weekdays 1003am to 1300pm.             

I remember studying the nature versus nurture debate at university, and assuming it was a course module that I wouldn't necessarily revisit anytime soon if at all. Prior to last night's Johnson/Dorries gushathon, I made a point of considering the nature nurture debate prior to pressing play. It won't be a popular opinion I'm sure, but I'm far more forgiving of Rachel Johnson's world view than I am of  those held by Nadine Dorries. Let's be frank here. Rachel Johnson is a product of an upbringing steeped in the conservative view, and nobody would expect to find her handcuffed to the railings at Greenham Common while taking a match to her bra. My conclusion with Ms Johnson is that a lot of opinions that she has been lambasted for, could almost be argued as coming from a caring place of ignorance given that the only world she has ever known is one of wealth and privilege. I can't however find any plausible justification for the views espoused by the Minister for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. Given the length of time it takes to even type the name of the such a critical government role, it allows a few seconds of actual ponderance on the fact that it's held by such a person.

Born Nadine Vanessa Bargery,in Liverpool in 1957 (there's a pun in that name somewhere. and I will find it) and raised in the Halewood area of the city close to the Ford Motors factory, a hop and a jump from Liverpool's Speke airport (as it was then known).before settling in nearby Runcorn while pursuing a nursing career at Warrington General hospital, it wouldn't be unfair to say that it was a working class start in an area of the country that had suffered a devastating socioeconomic downturn through the 70's not unlike many northern cities.  But it was the dawning of the 80's that brought the city of Liverpool to its knees when on 3rd July 1981 it all went bang... under the police 'Sus laws' a young black Liverpudlian called Leroy Cooper was arrested in the Toxteth district of the city in a supposed random stop and search by Merseyside police, and the natives of Toxteth took umbrage to this... and how! Two waves of riots saw locals in pitched battles against the local Gendarmerie, and what followed saw widespread violence, multiple injuries on both sides, and numerous buildings destroyed. What the police hadn't accounted for was coming face to face with a public who were sick to the back teeth of seeing the city's minorities continually oppressed during a time where things were just so bloody hard anyway that a tipping point had been reached. Liverpool is steeped in success stories born from its tradition of immigration which went hand in hand with the world famous docks that were the lifeblood of the city for so long, but as the success faded, much  of the black community fell into abject poverty, and the outlook was bleak. 

The reason for the rehearsal of Liverpool's fortunes through the 70's and early 80's is to give context to the zeitgeist running through a troubled city at the time when Nadine Dorries was in her mid-twenties. Liverpool's hospitals boasted the highest percentage of immigrants on their staff compared to the rest of the U.K. and it could be reasonably said that multiculturalism was embraced in the most part. Training as a nurse in and around the city at this time would have offered a certainty that you would be working with people of many many faiths and ethnicities, and it's hard to imagine slogging a 12 hour shift on a ward and thinking 'I love being ran ragged. I wish they'd send all the brown nurses home so I can work 24 hours straight'. More interesting perhaps is that Nadine Dorries spent a year on a medical placement in Zambia in 1982 so the abundance of experience around people from all creeds makes it all the more alarming that by 2013 she touted herself a joint Tory/UKIP candidate albeit naturally for a seat nowhere near her home town. Quite the leap from growing up in a city where the T word (Tory) is considered a more devilish slur than the C word. This is where I lose the will to rationally understand the mindset of Mad Nads... racial discrimination from the local police fomented a them and us mentality, but Ms Dorries plumped for 'them' and not 'us' despite having seen first hand the damage that such thinking had done to a city that brought her up. Call me woke, call me a lefty even, but such a visceral disregard for the people who she once walked among as equals, neighbours, and colleagues despite their skin colour is a bridge too far for me to comprehend.

And so to last night's hour of honking the Boris Johnson horn. The juicy bits from the LBC interview last night are of course available all across social media this morning so I'll just touch on the three key points that jumped out at me, and made me rewind and listen again with my lips pursed and notepad at the ready. Firstly, Rachel Johnson welcomed Nads onto the show and pointed out that we were all lucky that she was gracing us with her presence having been in attendance at a barbeque all afternoon. I'm not going to lie... my first thought was "Oh goody... she's fueled by Smirnoff," Alas it quickly became apparent that Leo Swayer wasn't going to be cracking her knuckles and calling everyone in sight a f'''ing misogynist. Did my heart sink? You'd better believe it did, but there was still gold in them there hills despite the disappointment of a seemingly sober exchange to follow.

The second standout moment occurred when the issue of the privatization of Channel 4 was raised. The reasoning offered by Ms Dorries was on the face of it relatively well explained and lucid if the internet had never been invented as a means of fact checking, and her explanation as to why Channel 4 was in imminent danger given that the channel recently posted profits of one billion, and that was during a pandemic, left a lot to ponder. Dorries simply claimed that this success was due to many reasons of which she couldn't disclose any at all, Apparently she shares bunk beds with Suella Braverman, and everything's a secret in their gang... Rachel Johnson then challenged Dorries' motives for privatizing a channel who's flagship news show was known to take a less conservative view, and asked if this influenced the decision to privatize... this was of course met with derision from the Culture Minister who deemed such a suggestion as an affront to her good name and professionalism... and then immediately threw in "Besides, if anybody paid any attention to what Channel 4 News says, we wouldn't have an 80 seat majority!" I took a cannabis break at that point... it was either that or launching a shoe at the telly (and not for the first time while enduring Dorries' televisual pearls of goblinry). 

And we arrive at point three. The two minute section of the broadcast that covered the Ministerial Code, which brings us nicely to the crowning glory of the entire hour. The phone-in... What could possibly go wrong? Along came Joe with his question. Does Boris need an Ethics Adviser, and what did the Minister for Whatever Boris Just Said think of Lord Geidt's resignation? Well, all bets were off by this point. Now it's probably a fair assessment that nobody expected Nads to make it through an hour with her lips moving without reminding us of exactly who she is, and we weren't to be disappointed. What followed was classic Nadine Dorries. 

"Hi Joe. Well you call him Lord Geidt but the rest of the country have never even heard of him and most people up north call him Lord Gedit, and I don't give a fig as do the public as to who he even was or what he did!"

Yep, she actually said that in describing a man who was carefully selected by Boris Johnson as his Ethics Adviser due to his unblemished record of fairness and impregnable moral fiber into a role vacated by a man who had also been carefully selected by Johnson for sporting all of the same credentials only to find out that his sole purpose of offering an opinion was deemed redundant and a general ball ache by the man who recruited him. That was where I gave up and returned to a more calming episode of Columbo on 5USA just to get my pulse once more near normal. 

Having spent this morning pouring over the fallout from the interview, what struck me the most is the indifference, and in most cases absolute avoidance of even covering off such a statement from a government minister responsible for culture when it's this very aspect of our political culture that should be the signal fire to the nation that we are facing some deeply troubling times. Now admittedly, Nadine Dorries is a one trick pony who always takes the side of the punisher and not the punished, but to reach a state of affairs where every person, publication, broadcaster, and institution that dares to point a finger in exasperation at the actual facts that make up the carnival that is Boris Johnson's government is labelled a nobody, a remainiac, a lefty, or woke, we have big big problems to face down. Mhairi Black gave a deeply insightful and terrifying speech to the Commons last month where she pivoted around a word, and the apparent lack of alarm surrounding its arrival into our political arena. By chance it could quite easily be one of Nadine Dorries preferred 9 letter words along with perennial favourites  Privatization and Misogyny... the word the Tories and their more fervent supporters always cackle and bray at the mention of... Fascism... and yes I did deliberately miscount the number of letters in the words privatization and misogyny... Come on people... it's not as if I'm the Minister for Digital. Culture, Media, and Sport... of course I can count... and spell