Nadine Dorries comes to Nick Clegg’s aid

A few days ago, Nick Clegg’s special advisor Richard Reeves sent a bunch of flowers to Conservative MP Nadine Dorries as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying ‘thank you’ for her comments about the Liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrats like nothing more than hearing Nadine Dorries complain about Liberal Democrat influence on the Government.

Reeves should be hot-footing it to the florist again after last night’s tweet from Nadine Dorries, attacking the Liberal Democrats on the Health & Social Care Bill: “Health Bill was great until the Liberal Democrats mutilated it”.

An issue as full of technical detail as the Health & Social Care Bill, and on which much of the media coverage generates heat rather than sheds light, is a classic example of a case where people look to see what the views of those they normally agree or disagree with are, using them as signposts to help guide them through the complexities.

Knowing Nadine Dorries dislikes what the Liberal Democrats have done to the Health & Social Care Bill is, in the eyes of grassroots members, a big mark in favour of the changes Lib Dem parliamentarians will argue they have secured. So too is the news that Shirley Williams now thinks sufficient changes have been secured to the Bill for it to be acceptable for the Bill to pass.

An outsider to the Liberal Democrats may well at this point be wondering where the various health professional bodies come into this. After all, are not their views also a helpful signpost through the complexities for conference voting representatives? Yes, but.

Yes – I am sure their views will be cited by some. But – arguably they have collectively missed a trick in doing little so far to attempt to influence the grassroots membership directly.

The influence of Dorries and Williams is important for the Liberal Democrat leadership because in just over a week the Liberal Democrat Spring conference meets in Gateshead, with the NHS likely to be the topic debated on the Sunday morning slot for emergency or topical motions.

It looks as if there will be two motions put up for consideration. One from Winchester Liberal Democrats (and now with the backing of the influential Social Liberal Forum), which calls for “all Liberal Democrats to work together to achieve the withdrawal or defeat of this flawed and unpopular Bill”. The other likely motion will be from Shirley Williams and others, detailing the changes the party has secured and which Nadine Dorries so dislikes, including the way the Bill curbs Labour’s privatisation moves from 2006. It will then therefore back the passage of the Bill.

That will leave a small procedural headache for the Lib Dem Conference Committee to sort out – does it put one, the other or both into the ballot of motions for conference representatives to choose from? However, whatever they choose, the outcome will substantively be the same – a  debate at conference with around seven speakers in total, with a Nadine Dorries-assisted Shirley Williams the key to the leadership’s hopes of getting the result they want.