Nadine Dorries and Charlotte Tranter Owen; two women, fiercely loyal to the man who held the gift of ermine in his pink podgy hands. Only one of them would win the prize. A fairytale come true for one, a broken heart and shattered dreams for the other.
Described by Amazon as a “gripping tale which finds the community alive with rumours and gossip”, Nadine Dorries wrote her fictional masterpiece Hide Her Name in 2014. With her name not only hidden, but struck off completely from Boris Johnson’s honours list, she must be reeling from the cruel irony of that prophetic title.
Liver bird
All she wanted was to be the ‘People’s Baroness’. Once described by the Daily Telegraph as a “tropical bird amongst all that dull, grey plumage on the Commons benches”, she was heartlessly deprived of her scarlet robe at the very last minute by privileged posh boys who would never let a working class child-pauper into the upper chamber and who, in any case, were obviously jealous of her special relationship with Johnson.
Nadine has never forgotten her roots and has always strived to protect the less advantaged. Leaving school at 16 she worked as a nurse at her local hospital in Warrington before leaving for Zambia, following her heart and finding love under the African skies together with the man who was to later father her three children, Paul Dorries.
A passionate and protective tigress of a mother, she once threatened journalist Ben Glaze of The Mirror that she would “nail his balls to the floor… with his own front teeth” if he dared contact her daughters for a story. How dare he want to know why one of them was being paid tens of thousands of pounds a year by the taxpayer for secretarial support to her mum when she lived 100 miles away?!
The Scouse with nowse
Only too aware of how hard life is when you live on the breadline, Dorries used her role as MP to vote against raising welfare benefits in line with inflation, for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits, against free school meals for hungry children outside term time and against a mansion tax.
She left her constituents without an MP while she appeared on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. She was the first to be voted off, but not before eating a camel’s toe and an ostrich’s anus. She then had the party whip suspended for filming without informing them. Found to have breached the code of conduct by not declaring her £82,000 fee, she declared that the committee investigating her were conducting a witch-hunt for which she would seek legal advice.
Has Boris copied her style? She went on to issue a full and unreserved apology, so maybe not.
She Loves Him Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!
After she was said to have divorced him, Paul Dorries got into a spot of hot water himself, and though the story was covered in the Daily Mail, they seemed more interested in the fact that they had searched and failed to find records of any marriage, let alone a divorce, between Nadine and Paul. Is Nadine still Nadine Hughes? Hughes being the name of her first husband Raymond, who appears to have been airbrushed completely out of her life. Oh Nadine, exotic bird, who are you?
Married or not, who cares? And looking at your ex, a striking resemblance to the big man BOJO himself is clear for all to see! You were his loyal defender until the last moment, you refuted challenges to his propriety, (un)swaying in your defense of him to ‘woke’ lefty journalists from Channel 4 who cynically doorstepped you on your way out of the members bar, only to be cast aside by a younger, university educated blonde with a double-barreled name.
You were careful to avoid naming her, but a double barrel must be something tempting to think about at moments like this. You handled yourself with customary grace when, talking to anyone who would listen this week, you refused to believe Johnson himself may have stabbed you in the back, and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the prime minister, and other ‘sinister forces’.
Nads and spads
Who is Charlotte Tranter Owen? Or should we say Baroness Owen?
Lady Owen is 29, a graduate of York University who went from being a short-term intern, to political assistant, to life peer, in the space of six years. No record of any long-term employment has been found, and her LinkedIn page shows no employment since October last year when she described herself as ‘special advisor to the PM’.
In a desperate attempt to make it all make sense, a confused population has pointed to the striking resemblance between Johnson’s first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen, and Charlotte. The dates seem to be plausible; she was born in 1993, the year the marriage fell apart and Charlotte was after all the name of Boris’s mother. It’s all so delicious it must be true. Allegra, however, is not recorded as having had children.
Further adding to the mystery, her parents have been found, though their marriage is recorded as having taken place in 1975, some 17 years before her birth.
Could she be an adopted love child? If not Allegra’s then whose? She really looks like Jennifer Arcuri too. You see how inexplicable situations create their own warped reality? So no, she’s not Boris’s love child.
Who she actually is, is hard to tell because no work experience outside short spells in Westminster can be traced. Hopping from month-long internships to short-term assistant jobs before serving under Johnson and Truss as special advisor, she left Downing Street with the latter last October.
Seriously, though
Publicising the act of advising Johnson and Truss is an act of such extraordinary hubris, maybe she has some sort of potential after all, but to put things into perspective, before becoming a Baroness in 1992 Margaret Thatcher had served in parliament as an MP, a minister, leader of the opposition and then prime minister, for a total of 33 years.
The youngest peer in our country’s history seems to have done absolutely nothing to merit the post. She will be aware of the noise surrounding her appointment, and hopefully as the days pass and the shock subsides, we will also focus on who is perhaps the second youngest ever peer, Ross Kempsell. At 31 he is also now a life peer. His contribution to British society? He worked for the Guido Fawkes website and Talk radio.
