Welcome, Nadine, to Nigel's home for deadbeat defectors

Kemi Badenoch, with another sadly lacklustre week of leading His Majesty’s official Opposition behind her, has had an unexpected boost – Nadine Dorries has defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Whatever limited gifts she brought to high office, Dorries has long outlived her usefulness to her party and the nation, and Badenoch can be forgiven for thinking that Farage is welcome to her. For the voting public, post-Boris, Dorries is no more than a reminder of a past record of sleaze, self-indulgence and incompetence that the Conservatives desperately need to leave behind. The defenestration of Angela Rayner may hurt Labour, but it won't necessarily bring much of a boost to the Tories. For that, they need to purge the worst elements of their past. That includes Nadine.

Anyone - and I carry the mental scars - who has subjected themselves to the paranoid fantasies contained in her curious semi-dramatised, semi-anonymised memoir The Plot will know that her view of the world is, shall we say, somewhat distorted.

The book, which has failed to make any impact on the real world, is an artefact of her fixation on Boris Johnson and the supposed conspiracy to destroy him by characters given lurid pseudonyms, presumably for legal reasons, such as “Dr No”, “The Wolf” and “The Dark Lord”. It never occurs to her that Johnson was perfectly capable of destroying himself, and indeed his party, with his final act being a successful attempt to ensure that Liz Truss succeeded him, and thus made him look good.

A sorry saga all round, then, and one that Dorries herself played a role in, enjoying Johnson's patronage and being promoted beyond her abilities. She was, and is, a better author of historical “clogs and shawls” romantic fiction than of cabinet ministerial work. She was never more than the ultimate Johnson groupie.