John Nicolson, the Scottish National party MP, has been cleared of bullying Nadine Dorries after an independent panel overturned an earlier ruling by the parliamentary standards watchdog. The panel found Nicolson had not bullied Dorries, the former culture secretary, when he liked or retweeted dozens of disparaging messages about her after the two clashed during a hearing in front of the culture, media and sport select committee. The independent experts said they had come to their decision in part because Dorries herself has been such a “frequent and aggressive tweeter”. In a report released on Tuesday, the panel said: “If the approach of the [standards] commissioner were accepted, then effective opposition would be seriously impeded. Proper vigorous opposition through social media would be swamped by spurious complaints, taking advantage of far too low a bar for bullying and harassment.” The complaint referred to a series of tweets Nicolson sent in the aftermath of her appearance as culture secretary before the select committee in November 2021. In a 24-hour period, Nicolson tweeted, liked and retweeted disparaging material about Dorries, including liking tweets that described her as “grotesque”, a “vacuous goon”, and as having been “ragdolled” by him during the hearing. Dorries did not contact the parliamentary standards commissioner until nearly a year later, when she reported the tweets as harassment and bullying. The panel took note of the fact that Dorries reported the tweets amid a separate row with the committee over whether she made had made false claims about a Channel 4 documentary. The panel’s report reveals that the commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, upheld Dorries’ complaint, before submitting it to the panel to decide Nicolson’s punishment. After the SNP MP appealed, the panel decided to overturn the original ruling.
The independent experts said Greenberg had failed to take into account the highly charged nature of the political dispute between the two and Dorries’ own history of aggressive tweeting. It gave one example where Dorries tweeted she would “nail [a journalist’s] balls to the floor using [their] own front teeth” and another where she retweeted someone calling a journalist “an apologist for Islamic atrocities”. The report said: “Political discourse, and in particular political opposition, can involve behaviour which, in a different context, would be regarded (at least) as offensive or insulting, and sometimes intimidating, without constituting an abuse or misuse of power. Opposition attacks and government counterattacks are commonly of that nature, in the chamber of the House of Commons and beyond.” Dorries has said she will stand down as an MP after she was not included on a list of people to be given peerages as part of Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list. She has blamed Downing Street for not making clear to her that she would have to stand down before being nominated. The former culture secretary responded to the report on Tuesday afternoon via Twitter, saying: “In any workplace other than parliament where the rule of law, not privilege applies, Nicholson [sic] would have been instantly dismissed.”