Towards the end of last month, it was announced that the rates of severance pay awarded to members of the UK's parliament who lose – or choose not to contest – their current seats at the next general election would be doubled. This will come as a great comfort to those many Conservatives who’ve already announced that they won’t be standing again, and to the many more who expect the voters to throw them out.

That enhanced compensation package won’t however benefit one of their number, the former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries.

During her time as a Cabinet minister, as opinionated as she was ill-informed, and one never afraid to shoot off her mouth at the mildest provocation, Dorries had tended to make the amnesiac surgeonfish Dory in Disney’s Finding Nemo seem like a creature of great cerebral consistency and good sense.

In early June, Ms. Dorries had declared her attention to step down as an MP with immediate effect. Her announcement had coincided with her old ally Boris Johnson’s decision to leave the House of Commons rather than face the sanctions that were about to be imposed upon him for having been found to have lied to parliament about his tendency to treat pandemic lockdowns as cues for wild parties.

However, much to the consternation of her peers and to the confusion of the general public, she’d then followed her notice to quit with a steadfast refusal to go. This appeared to be related to the fact that the attempts by her former boss to grant her a place in the House of Lords had been blocked.

And so she’d launched her plan for an agonisingly protracted campaign of revenge against those whom she believed to have thwarted her dreams of a lifetime sinecure.

Nevertheless, in the face of mounting political, media and public pressure, Ms. Dorries at last formally quit parliament at the end of August. In doing so, she revealed that she was writing a typically unfiltered book-length exposé of her experiences in British politics, as she published her full resignation letter in – of course – the Daily Mail, the newspaper most sympathetic to her brand of anti-intellectual populism.

It would be an understatement to suggest that her farewell shot wasn’t entirely magnanimous to her opponents in the upper echelons of her own party.

Indeed, as she huffed off towards the political horizon, she took pains to ridicule Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s “gleaming smile” and “platitudes”, and to mock the multimillionaire premier’s “Prada shoes and Savile Row suit”.

Related News

News from Nowhere: Left Behind

News from Nowhere: Picture this

She accused him of squandering “the goodwill of the people,” of “demeaning his office” and of abandoning “the fundamental principles of Conservatism.”

As her self-pity revealed increasing shades of paranoia, Ms. Dorries went on to suggest that Mr. Sunak had sat at the heart of a dark plot to displace her from frontline politics, just as he’d removed her beloved Boris from the fray.

Then, with a degree of hypocrisy verging upon the hilarious, the woman who’d once so passionately defended Mr. Johnson’s unparalleled record of deceit and obfuscation insisted upon condemning the current Tory leader not only for achieving “absolutely nothing” but for being a “disingenuous” operator whose strategies had been built upon “shady promises.”

By this point, the petty vitriol of her parting rant had inevitably betrayed the untenably precarious nature of her argument and her position. It may indeed have done a disservice not only to her own reputation but to the cause still championed by her party’s more ardent loyalists to Boris Johnson’s brash and uncompromising vision of Brexit, serving as a reminder to parliamentary colleagues of the irrational and turbulent past they’ve been trying to put behind them.

Towards the end of her lengthy farewell note – a verbose polemic which may give her publishers pause for thought – she wrote that history wouldn’t judge Mr. Sunak kindly.

Yet one cannot easily imagine that too many future historians will be lining up to praise the morally vacuous and economically illiterate administrations of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, governments in which Nadine Dorries held senior roles and to which she’d afforded her unstinting and unquestioning support.

Her latest resignation announcement came the same day that thirty families launched a court case to sue the government for compensation for the deaths of relatives who had died during the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis, as a result of a policy to discharge people from hospitals into care homes without having been tested for the virus – a policy which was last year ruled unlawful by a High Court judgement.

This was yet another timely reminder of the incompetence and negligence of the administrations in which Nadine Dorries had served, and further took the sting out of her unedifying bile, an attack she’d intended as a bombshell but which may well turn out to be something of a damp squib.

Indeed, one senior Conservative remarked that she’d done her best to turn her departure into a “psychodrama”, before adding the most devastatingly dismissive of political epitaphs imaginable: “I’m not planning on wasting a second more of my life thinking about Nadine Dorries.”

The following morning the front page of the right-wing Daily Express declared that “Tory infighting” would “gift Labour the keys to Number 10”. While her words and her name may soon be forgotten, many outside her party will doubtless hope that this will be her eventual legacy.