It seems as if there may be two Nadine Dorries. The first is the one most people know. The MP who bunked off parliament to earn roughly £80k as a contestant on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and who could pick a fight with her reflection. And then there’s the newly appointed cabinet minister who chose to mark her first appearance before the culture select committee by saying as little as possible in order to avoid any controversy. Quite which one Boris Johnson thought he was getting as his new culture secretary is anyone’s guess. First to ask questions was John Nicolson. There’s no love lost between Nicolson and Dorries as the SNP MP has frequently attacked her for her anti-gay rhetoric and voting record, but Dorries was determined to keep things civil. At least initially. Asked to explain the fiasco over Paul Dacre’s withdrawal from the Ofcom job, despite the rules having been changed to allow him a second go at applying for the job, Dorries merely shrugged.
She couldn’t possibly comment as the process was ongoing. All she would say was that the rules had been changed to allow for a more diverse range of applicants. There just hadn’t been enough 70-year-old white men with extreme right-wing views applying first time round. But when she had made up her mind on the new person for the job, the committee would be first to know. Though she would like to remind everyone that the committee had no power of veto so it could effectively just do one if it wasn’t happy. Or words to that effect. Dorries smiled politely. Classic passive aggression. The session continued in much the same vein. Dorries would have loved to inform the committee who was in line to become the next chair of the Charity Commission but again the process was ongoing and it wouldn’t be fair on those on the shortlist. If indeed there was a shortlist. She couldn’t even confirm that. Nor could she say that she was looking for someone with an anti-woke agenda. The very idea! She had no idea why it had been reported that she had a vested interest in someone anti-woke. All she wanted was someone who was going to take a common-sense approach. So who did she think qualified as woke, asked Labour’s Clive Efford. “My daughters,” she said. And who was an Islington lefty? “One of my daughters.” Efford was momentarily unsettled. He hadn’t expected Dorries to have a sense of humour. But he soon regained his train of thought and asked the minister about bias in the BBC. In particular Nick Robinson’s interview with Johnson at the Tory party conference, after which the Sunday Times had reported she was incandescent and had said it would cost the BBC a lot of money.
Back to see-nothing, hear-nothing, say-nothing Dorries. While it was true the BBC had problems with impartiality, she said, she had nothing to say about this particular interview because she hadn’t heard it. After all, why would a culture secretary bother to listen to the prime minister’s showpiece interview on the day of his speech to the party conference? Or even listen to it on catch-up once she had heard there was a fuss going on about it? And she definitely had never said a bad word about the BBC, because that just wasn’t her style. She was just an everyday woman who didn’t like to make waves. A woman more sinned against than sinning. So the Sunday Times must have made it up. Nor did she have much to say about the Brits choosing not to have separate male and female categories for next year’s awards ceremony. This was absolutely the first she had ever heard of it, she said. Despite the news being in almost every paper. All she would say was that she hoped female artists didn’t get marginalised, in the same way that female writers do. It sounded very much as if she is still bitter that none of her bestselling books about honest but poor Liverpool families doing their best has yet to be longlisted for the Booker prize. Or even for the Women’s prize for fiction. Surely an oversight that the judges will soon rectify. Just over an hour in to the session, Dorries’s guard did slip rather to reveal her spikier side. And inevitably it was Nicolson who goaded her. First he caught her out over her suggestion that the BBC wouldn’t be still around in 10 years’ time, forcing her to contradict herself within minutes, and then he picked her up on offensive tweets she had made to Laura Kuenssberg. Was that the behaviour of a cabinet minister? Yeah but no but yeah but no. She really, really respected Laura but had just been trying to point out that the message she had tweeted was ridiculous. In any case she had deleted it. Hmm. Then it got even nastier. Nicolson moved on to tweets Dorries had written about the radio presenter, James O’Brien. Was it OK to have called him a “public school, posh boy eff-wit”? Well, said Nad, O’Brien’s tweets about her constituted harassment. Except there weren’t any of his tweets that immediately came to mind. Dorries and Nicolson then got into an argument about which of them had caused the most late-night Twitter pile-ons, before the committee chair, Julian Knight, declared the contest a draw. The session ended with Labour’s Kevin Brennan asking whether she thought that Dacre’s observations about her department’s permanent secretary amounted to misogyny. “No comment,” she said, though her earlier remarks suggested that she did. So we can now add sexist to the more diverse brief for the Ofcom chair. John Crace and Zoe Williams will be live on stage in London at a Guardian Live event on 13 December. Join the conversation in-person or online by booking tickets here A Farewell to Calm by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply