Published: May 23rd 2009 - at 1:51 am

At the risk of indulging in a bit of a Dorries overload, there’s a brief exchange of comments in the ritual bloodletting that followed Tim Mongomerie’s Conservative Home post on her rather churlish reaction to the Telegraph’s expenses exposé that’s well worth flagging up as, perhaps, something of a salutary lesson for some MPs/Parliamentary candidates:

Jingouk said…

Thank you, conservativehome, for showing posts that truly reflect people’s anger with Nadine Dorries.

I have been protesting that she has been suppressing critical posts on her site to the detriment of Tory values. She shows a token number but has suppressed the majority – it reads like Soviet propaganda. This is where it has got her. I suspect she has deluded herself.

Friday, May 22, 2009 at 09:40

…

Twotrees said in reply to Jingouk…

I quite agree Jingouk. My last three comments in reply to her posted blogs have been suppressed.

Short sighted of her really as I have been a Mid-Beds Tory voter for many years.

Friday, May 22, 2009 at 10:09

…

Amanda said in reply to Twotrees…

Yes, I too can report the same behaviour of not posting comments that disagree with her.

My family are her constituents, we will now be actively seeking her deselection. She does not represent the views of Mid-Bedfordshire Conservatives. We will not be voting for her ever again – and if that means we will not be voting Conservative so be it.

Friday, May 22, 2009 at 13:43

Dorries is, of course, anything but lacking in previous form when it comes to taking a Pravda-like approach to moderaqting comments posted to her ‘blog’, most notoriously in relation to her decision to shut down her site’s comments facility when challenged over her blatant attempt to smear both Ben Goldacre and other members of the Science and Technology Select Committee in her own dubious contribution to the Committee’s otherwise exemplary report on scientific developments relating to abortion.

As such one can hardly be surprised to find others, even Tory voters/members complaining that they too have seen polite but critical comments disappearing into the ether rather than appearing on her site. What makes this a little different to previous occasions on which Dorries is known to have dealt with visitors to her site in bad faith is, however, that, if these comments are taken at face value, then on this occasion it is, at the very least, her own constituents, if not members of the Conservative Association to whom she ultimately accountable as a constituency MP, that have seen their opinions treated with complete disdain.

There is, in this, clearly a lesson that all blogging MP’s/Candidates need to take to heart if/when they provide visitors to their blog with the ability to post comments.

When dealing with and, particularly, moderating and/or responding to user comments one can never quite be sure whether a particular comment may have been posted by a political opponent, a random member of the public, or constituent whose vote you’ll be asking for at the next election. If your blog software allows you to track IP addresses then you may get some help by using a geolocation service but these are often far from reliable and, consequently, the only safe approach to take – provided that a comment is not abusive or potentially libellous – is that of treating each and every comment you receive as if has been posted by a constituent and proceed accordingly.

Dorries, as seems evident from the comments at Con Home, has failed to appreciate that fact and may now, it seems, be starting to pay the price for her evident lack of sensitivity to the public mood nationally and in her constituency.

As I write this, the ‘blog’ section of the her website is showing a 404 error and its highly unlikely that that’s the result of a simple technical fault as, in putting together the complaint that was submitted and, in part, upheld by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, one of things that we clearly established was that the ‘blog’ was – and still is, despite the small amount of DNS and Javascript trickery used to create the [false] impression of separation required by parliamentary regulation – fully integrated into her main website, which is still online.

What’s not clear, at this point in time, is whether its sudden disappearance stems directly from the rebuke issued by David Cameron or whether members of her own local association have decided that enough is enough and that its time for her to adopt a much lower public profile rather than continue to embarrass both herself and the Conservative Party.

About the author
'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
· Other posts by Unity


Story Filed Under: Blog

Reader comments

Reactions: Twitter, blogs

1. Liberal Conspiracy

   New post: Comment and be damned http://bit.ly/YJFk9

2. Liberal Conspiracy

   New post: Comment and be damned http://bit.ly/YJFk9

3. Tim Ireland

   Greast post by Unity on Nadine Dorries, Tory reaction, and her now-missing non-blog http://bit.ly/X9itQ #sackdorries

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.