Recall of MPs Bill

Mike Freer Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I speak to the amendments as someone who is accustomed to being in the eye of a political storm. I am possibly the only MP in the Chamber who has had an attempt at recall mounted against them. When my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) first tabled the amendments, he asked me to speak about my own experience. At the time I decided not to do so, because I did not think it was particularly appropriate. But having heard some of the hot air in the Chamber tonight, I feel compelled to use my own example, and its consequences, to lay some of those bogus arguments to rest.

Two years ago today, I took part in a reality TV programme called “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here” and I disappeared to Australia. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) asked what would happen if a local or national newspaper ran a campaign against an MP, but I had every national newspaper against me and not just for a day but for a month—in my study they stand waist high. Of course, none of those newspapers said that Parliament was in recess. None of them said that I did not miss any Government legislation. None of them said that I had spent every day of the summer in my constituency office and the trip was my holiday. There were even Members who joined in the outcry against me, giving comments to the newspapers from their sun loungers from Barbados to Benidorm. Nobody said, “Oh, by the way, we are in recess”, and a massive media storm ensued. Even my local radio station, BBC Three Counties, went to my constituency and vox-popped constituents. It did not take comments from constituents who were backing me—it refused to do so. The national media created a perfect storm and rode on the crest of it for an entire month, giving them thousands of column inches.

In the middle of all of that, someone decided that I should be recalled and that they would get together a national petition. Out of the entire UK population of 65 million, one month to the day after the furore started, a national online, click and send petition—the type to which someone can contribute when they have had a bottle of red wine, or been down the pub, or read the local newspaper and got really angry with what they have read—had just 766 signatures. Facebook was a different story. The petition got just 16 likes.

So it is nonsense to say that the media can attack Members or whip up their constituents to get them recalled. There was no national newspaper, political programme or radio station that did not have it in for me during that month when I was in Australia—

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Nadine Dorries]

I am not going to give way at all.

Anyone would think that every one of my constituents loathed me, but they did not. In fact, hardly any of my constituents signed that petition.