I’ll take Posh Ponce Dave over ‘Mad Nad’

News flash! Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid Bedfordshire, has called Man of the Pasties David Cameron and George “Granny Crusher” Osborne “arrogant posh boys” and “out of touch”, to the surprise of absolutely no one except possibly jaded journalists looking for column filler. The real surprise here should be that Ms Dorries’ attack on the PM is completely and utterly hypocritical.

Forget that her opinions conveniently out themselves when the Tory leadership is running lower in opinion polls than ever; though it is mean to kick a man when he’s down, as the poet John Copper Clarke once said: “Name me a better time.” You might even disregard the possibility that Ms Dorries is sourly turning on a leader whose planned boundary changes could make her constituency as non- existent as, say, a certain pasty shop at Leeds station. What I want to examine is how “down with the people” Dorries is, if Cameron and Osborne are so “out of touch.”

For here is the MP who proposed a controversial bill calling for, among other things, compulsory lessons in sexual abstinence for teenage girls. Only girls, because apparently teenage boys are prudish celibates with absolutely no inclination towards rampant sex, as films like American Pie and Superbad have taught us.

The entire idea was condemned by the chief executive of the British Humanist Association as “a dangerously unrealistic and irresponsible proposition for our young people,” which doesn’t sound anything like “a really up-to-date proposition which fully understands how teenagers think and act today.” Nor did the bill even take into account necessity, since teenage pregnancies are at their lowest rate since the early 1980s without lessons for girls on how to keep yourself from seducing your prudish boyfriend.

It takes a certain amount of arrogance to ride roughshod over reality as Dorries has here and in similar campaigns. Dorries has called a TUC motion calling on employers to consider the health-impact of their dress codes “a proposal to ban the wearing of high heels in the office.” She has also proposed an amendment on abortion laws that was so “in touch” with current feeling that it was rejected by 368 votes to 188, not least because it would have allowed independent counsellors, some of whom are influenced by Christian pro-life groups, access to vulnerable women.

So try not to feel too sorry for poor Ms Dorries, as Cameron and Co. laugh off her (however accurate) rabid attack: if they were more “in touch” with her world view, we’d all be in real trouble.