Nadine Dorries has been left red-faced after her latest attack on Rishi Sunak backfired spectacularly.
The former cabinet minister thought Harriet Harman had dropped the prime minister in it when she revealed the government had given her the green light to continue as chair of the privileges committee investigating Boris Johnson.
Harman said she wanted to avoid the “perception” that she was biased against the former PM because of tweets she had previously posted about partygate.
She said she was “assured that I should continue the work ... so I did just that”.
Dorries - a close ally of Johnson - tweeted this afternoon that “Harman’s speech was very revealing and effectively threw No10 under a bus”.
She added: “It implied, that despite the fact that she had already tweeted in advance of the hearings that Johnson was guilty, that she had the full backing of the PM and therefore the Gov to chair the committee.”
However, it seemed to have escaped the former culture secretary’s notice that at the time Harman approached the government last year, the prime minister was still Johnson himself – a fact gleefully pointed out by Twitter users.
Dorries’s aborted political assassination came barely a week after she accused Sunak and fellow “posh boy” James Forsyth, the PM’s political secretary, of blocking Johnson’s attempt to give her a peerage.
But despite saying she was resigning as an MP for Mid Bedfordshire “with immediate effect” in protest, she has yet to formally quit.