An ex-Tory minister and arguably Boris Johnson’s biggest fan has defected to Reform UK.
Nadine Dorries, who has previously served as culture secretary and health minister under the former Conservative PM, said she believes her former party is ‘dead’.
Speaking to MailOnline, she said it took her a year to reach ‘possibly the most difficult’ decision she’s ever made.
She had been a member of the Conservative Party for 30 years – but has now left to join Nigel Farage’s party, just in time for the Reform UK annual conference.
Ms Dorries stepped down as MP for Mid-Bedfordshire in 2023, after 18 years in the House of Commons.
Explaining her decision, she said: ‘I am still being true to who I am and to the reason I became involved in politics in the first instance: to keep a left-wing Labour government out of No 10 – for all our sakes.
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‘My core beliefs are the same today as they were the day I joined the Conservatives back in 1995. It was the Conservative Party that had changed, not me.
‘Today, to my friends in my former party I would say this: as we teeter on the precipice of terminal economic and social decline, you don’t have the luxury of time to stand stupefied, wondering what went wrong and thinking about how to put it right sometime in the future.
‘Nor do you have time to hope that your party will one day wake up, get its act together and unite to rid us of a Labour government that is driving our country into the ground.
‘For me and others who lived through Labour’s tenure in the 1970s, we know how this story ends.’
Ms Dorries isn’t the first Conservative to jump ship to Reform UK.
Former Welsh secretary David Jones, ex-Tory chairman Sir Jake Berry, Gravesham MP Adam Holloway, and Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the mayor of Greater Lincolnshire.
Discussing the end of Boris Johnson’s tenure, Ms Dorries said she no longer wanted to work with MPs she considered to be ‘regicidal and self-serving’.
She added: ‘I will always be a true and loyal friend to Boris and I will always defend how he conducted himself as PM.’
Ms Dorries said she had known Nigel Farage for ‘some considerable time’ – and she believes he is ‘the only politician who has the answers, the knowledge and the will to deliver’.
Responding to the news, a Liberal Democrat source said: ‘We don’t know who to feel more sorry for, Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage.’
In a post on X, newly-elected Green Party leader Zack Polanski said: ‘Nadine Dorries joining Reform isn’t a shock. It’s logical for a politics of cruelty, corruption, and the collapse of neoliberalism.
‘The rise of Reform is the fault of a failing Labour government & their vapid politics. We’re growing the alternative.’
A Labour Party spokesperson said: ‘Nadine Dorries says the Tory party is dead – as one of the people who helped to kill it, she should know.
‘She backed Boris Johnson through thick and thin despite the partying in Downing Street during the pandemic while people couldn’t see their loved ones. And now she wants to help unleash the same chaos the Tories inflicted on Britain by joining Nigel Farage’s Reform.
‘Nadine Dorries has gone on quite a political journey – from being the minister who introduced the Online Safety Bill to joining a party that wants to scrap it without having any idea how to replace its protections for children and adults.
‘It’s a perfect illustration of how incoherent Reform are – all anger, no answers, with contradictions building by the day.’
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