Nadine Dorries: vile and abusive messages

Nadine Dorries once told a room full of people that I was under police investigation after sending her "vile, abusive messages". The investigation she spoke of never took place, Dorries cannot produce any evidence of her making a complaint, and even though she is now compelled by law to produce the email messages she spoke of, she has refused. (She instead instigated an investigation by misleading police, then lied about the outcome of that investigation, but there'll be more on that soon enough.)

So what are we to make of the following text message that the Daily Mail have published, citing recipient Shailesh Vara as the source?

Nadine's bawdy border war

Europe isn’t the main source of tensions among Tory MPs at the moment. The thing that is really driving a wedge between them is the boundary review.

These constituency changes are designed to shrink the House of Commons from 650 MPs to 600. They have left some Tories with much reduced majorities and others with no seat at all.

Nadine Dorries, right, a charismatic and controversial MP, is one of those whose seat has been cut from under her by the boundary review. Judging by a text message she sent to her colleague Shailesh Vara this month, she thinks little of those who are trying to use this as an opportunity to move to the safest seat possible.

She messaged him:

‘I’m getting reports from conference that you are unhappy with being left with only an 8 and ½ thousand majority and you fancy St Neotts [sic]. You may have noticed, some of us have been left with no seat whatsoever. I don’t believe these rumours are true because a) I don’t think you would make yourself look like such a shallow, selfish greedy d*** and b) you know you would have a fight on your hands of vicious proportions. So may I suggest that you simply f*** off back to your own seat and look after your fat majority and leave those of us who have no seat to fight over the pickings. And by the way, I’m also sending this text to the chief. Nadine.’

Friends of Vara, who is a party whip, say that he was shocked by this intemperate texted tongue-lashing.

They complain, with some justification, that telling a fellow MP to ‘f*** off back to your own seat’ is hardly collegiate.

It is, though, a sign that Dorries, who has made it to the House of Commons from a council estate in Liverpool, has no intention of quitting without a fight.

But if she is going to get the seat, she is going to have to remember that there is only one ‘t’ in Neots.

Is this vile? It's certainly abusive. It also reveals something about Dorries' priorities that's unlikely to go down well with her present constituents in Mid Bedfordshire.