Steerpike

She's done it again. Having re-ignited the Tory wars with her shock plans to quit parliament last Friday, now Nadine Dorries is delaying her resignation plans – prolonging the by-election misery for Rishi Sunak. The former Culture Secretary may not leave the Commons until the summer recess, pushing a by-election in her Mid-Bedfordshire constituency into the run-up to the Tories' annual conference in the autumn. Just when Rishi wants to sell himself to the nation... Friends of hers have told the Daily Mail – where Dorries writes a weekly column – that former Labour MP Rosie Cooper took two months to go after she formally resigned. 'It's her prerogative when she decides to go,' said one. 'She's not going to give Sunak the convenience of three by-elections on the same day.

‘Bizarre’ is a high bar in Scottish politics these days, but the SNP has comfortably cleared it once again. The party's deputy leader Keith Brown revealed Nationalist MSPs have agreed to ‘send some flowers’ to Nicola Sturgeon ‘as a mark of sympathy, given what she has been through over recent days’.  Sturgeon was arrested on Sunday by police investigating allegations of financial misconduct. She was released without charge after seven hours. Her husband, and former SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell and the party’s ex-treasurer Colin Beattie were previously arrested and similarly released without charge.  The bouquet is a nice gesture from the SNP group, but Mr Steerpike wonders what they’re going to do about a card.

Cast your minds back, to a simpler time. It was many moons ago in, er, February of this year, back when the blessed Nicola resigned as First Minister of Scotland. Back then, she was hailed by self-regarding sensibles across the land: a decent, rational progressive who got Covid right (even though England and Scotland's death rates were near-identical). Sturgeon was the LGBT ally brought down over trans rights; the well-meaning liberal who led a better class of government than wicked Boris Johnson and his bunch of venal Tories. Below are six badly-aged reactions to Sturgeon's resignation which best capture that long-forgotten time in British politics...

Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested in connection with the probe into SNP finances. A spokesperson for Nicola Sturgeon confirmed: 'Nicola Sturgeon has today, Sunday 11th June, by arrangement with Police Scotland, attended an interview where she was to be arrested and questioned in relation to Operation Branchform. Nicola has consistently said she would co-operate with the investigation if asked and continues to do so.' This evening, a few hours after Sturgeon was arrested, a spokesman for Police Scotland confirmed Sturgeon had been released without charge. A report will be sent to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

Not another one. Less than 24 hours after Nadine Dorries and Boris Johnson announced they were quitting the Commons, Nigel Adams has declared that he too is quitting with immediate effect. The longtime Boris backer was reportedly in line for a peerage in Johnson's resignation honours' list but did not make the final cut. Now, he is off, preferring like Dorries to quit now rather than stand down at the next election as he had previously claimed. That means of course yet another by-election in Adams' Yorkshire constituency, with the local Tories in Selby and Ainsty this week selecting local boy Michael Naughton to be his successor. In a statement Adams wrote on Twitter that: Yesterday, Selby Conservatives selected an excellent new parliamentary candidate.

There has never been any love lost between Nadine Dorries and Rishi Sunak. The former holds the latter responsible for bringing down Boris Johnson and has made her feelings clear in multiple angry tweets. During last summer's leadership race, she attacked him for his expensive clothes and shoes; she complained that his premiership had seen Johnson's legacy washed 'down the drain.' And today Dorries has given Sunak one last leaving present: announcing her intention to immediately quit the Commons and trigger a by-election in her safe seat of Mid-Bedfordshire. In 2019, the Tories won here with a majority of 24,000. But Labour are currently 15 points ahead in the polls and in last month's elections Dorries' local party lost overall control of Central Bedfordshire.

It’s the end of an era. Ian Blackford has this week announced he will be standing down as an MP at the next election. Not quite making it to a decade in the Commons, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber released a 659-word article about his resignation that, er, didn’t quite manage to explain the reasons for his resignation. No matter. Mr S can list a number of reasons why Blackford might have been particularly keen to leave his role… The Patrick Grady fiasco Cast your mind back to last year when Blackford ordered his MPs to lend their support to a sex pest in their own party.

You can’t leave Scotland alone for five minutes without another front opening up in the gender wars. Between legislating for doctor-free gender changes at 16 and housing trans rapists in women’s prisons, the Scots are apparently eager to rebrand themselves as the world’s most achingly progressive nation: Canada without the mounties. Even Justin Trudeau would find all this allyship exhausting.  The latest skirmish is over one of the more colourful imports from the US culture wars, Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), in which drag artists read to children down the local school or library. Some say this is inappropriate while others insist it’s no different from pantomimes, except Widow Twankie is reading the kids some Dr Seuss.  Douglas Ross disagrees.

‘I was in two minds about accepting this acknowledgment,’ says the now Dame Jacinda Ardern, reflecting on how ‘humbled’ she feels today to receive the Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. ‘For me this is a way to say thank you – to my family, to my colleagues, and to the people who supported me to take on the most challenging and rewarding role of my life.’ Rewarding, eh? Note Dame J’s use of the world ‘acknowledgment’ – rather than, say, honour – a deft nod to her republicanism. It also, with less subtlety, reveals a certain arrogance. Is it really ‘humbling’ to be merely ‘acknowledged’? Mr S thinks not.  Ardern has come a long way.