Journalists Accused of “Harassment” by Nadine Dorries

From the London Times:

Nadine Dorries, the Tory MP who appeared on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, has accused journalists of invading her privacy and threatened to call the police if they turn up to her constituency office.

This is, of course, Dorries’ default position when it comes to unwelcome attention: in the past, she has complained to the police about on-line critics of her behaviour as a public figure, including her former election rival Linda Jack, and on one occasion she even claimed to have reported someone for libel (really).

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail claims that the paper has been trying to reach her in relation to a speech she made in Parliament in 2010:

All week, the Mail has also been trying to get Mrs Dorries to answer the same question. But she failed to respond to our emails and phone calls to her Westminster office.

Instead, she went on the attack on Twitter: ‘If another journalist visits my home, members of my family, their homes or my office, I will inform the police,’ she declared in one outburst. ‘This is harassment.’ In fact, the only other member of her family who has been approached by us is Mr Dorries.

Harassment? Or legitimate journalistic question?

Dorries’ 2010 speech was an attack on the allegedly “corrupt dealings” of an investment company called WorldSpreads; however, according to the Mail:

But there was one thing — or, rather, one person — Mrs Dorries failed to mention when she rose to her feet in the Commons to highlight the scandal. 

This was financial adviser Paul Dorries…They separated in around 2007. 

It appears that shortly after their split, 59-year-old Mr Dorries began introducing the very investors Mrs Dorries later referred to in her speech to WorldSpreads, for which he was to receive commission.

Investors advised by Mr Dorries appear to have lost life-changing amounts of money, but although the very name “WorldSpreads” obviously implies high risk (the crucial clue being the term “spread betting”), Nadine Dorries  insists that the money was lost due to criminal malpractice; and indeed, on Twitter today, Dorries complains that the Mail article failed to mention that the company is allegedly currently “being investigated by the police”. Accusations by others against the company – which has since entered administration – were noted by the Telegraph in April. Dorries’ speech referred to WorldSpreads as a “stockbroking firm”, which, as Unity at Ministry of Truth noted in 2011, was inaccurate (Unity’s post, as usual, also contains a great deal of other important background details).

The Mail makes it clear that Paul Dorries also regards himself as a “victim” of WorldSpreads, and that there is no evidence of impropriety on his part. However, the paper also notes court judgements against him in relation to duff investment advice concerning “an internet venture based on the concept of Facebook” thought up by his “associates”.

There’s also evidence of questionable judgement: he allegedly tried to reassure one investor who had received a devastating statement that she was half a million quid down “that something must have gone wrong with the WorldSpreads computer”, and he apparently took financial advice of his own – from a psychic:

The psychic was approached by Mr Dorries, he says, who came armed with a list of companies, then asked him which ones would be successful. ‘I pointed out about 20.’ Mr Dorries was delighted with the results, apparently, and came back to see him.

Paul Dorries’ business dealings were previously discussed on a blog run by Chris Paul (which has since become infected with malware, according to Google – here’s Wayback’s cache), and this post included the claim that disgruntled investors had hired a private detective agency (Mike Lenny & Co) to investigate him; shortly after Paul published his piece, his blog received anonymous comments stating that Mr Dorries had (perhaps inevitably) reported him to the police. The comments specifically mentioned  Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, and this detail also appeared in a letter sent by Nadine Dorries to police on the same day (this is all discussed here). The comments came in on 10 July 2010; Nadine Dorries raised the issue of WorldSpreads in Parliament on 27 July 2010.

The Mail article also raises questions about Dorries’ marital status:

…our research has been unable to unearth any trace of a marriage certificate in this country. Some of Mrs Dorries’s relatives, we have been told, were surprised never to have been shown wedding photographs of the happy couple. 

…just as we could not find any trace of a marriage certificate using the obvious search terms, we could find no record of their divorce, either, in the Central Index of Decree Absolutes at the Principal Registry of the Family Division in London.

However, a mid-November article in the same paper (by a different journalist) has the detail that

The date of Nadine and Paul’s wedding is unclear — the Mail has been unable to find any trace of a marriage in this country. It is likely they married abroad.

Miss Dorries has spoken in the past about how, early on in the marriage, they spent a year together in Zambia…

This article also details the “shock” existence of a supposed “secret husband” – which in fact turns out to have been a previous husband before Paul Dorries, whom she has dropped from her official biography. It’s not a subject of any real interest to anyone, and it’s not an avenue of enquiry that on-line critics of her public activities have ever felt the need to explore; Unity wrote in the same post that “there is apparently a first husband out there… but please don’t pursue the matter any further than this as I’ve been advised that he’s much better off out of things”.

According to the Mail, Dorries married this man when she was very young and had just suffered a bereavement, and one can understand why she wouldn’t feel the need to keep reminding the world – and herself – of a unhappy personal matter from the 1970s. However, the fact the Mail knows of him at least puts to bed a possibility that had crossed my mind, which is that the Dorries marriage certificate couldn’t be found due to confusion over Nadine’s surname at the time. Personally, though, I’m not convinced that there’s anything “weird” or of wider interest about her past marital arrangements.

UPDATE (August 2019): Paul is no longer with us, and on social media Dorries has described him as her husband, whom she nursed in his final illness – this is despite having written an op-ed for The Times in March 2019 in which she discussed her divorce as a model for Brexit negotiators and referred explicitly to her “ex-husband”, and despite her own references to another man as being her “partner”. Her announcement garnered much online sympathy, and one person who dared to ask about the anomaly was given short shrift by her supporters. In contrast to 2012, the media doesn’t appear to have shown any interest.