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.
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