Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid Bedfordshire, is to join the cast of I'm A Celebrity [sic]... Get Me Out Of Here!
The 55-year-old Tory MP has been suspended by her Conservative party as she opts to ditch her duties to her constituency and instead appear on a reality TV show.
Mrs Dorries has apparently defended her decision to appear on a prime time show by stating that she believes MPs should go where the people go. I'm not completely sure she quite understands, then, what I'm A Celebrity is about.
A vast amount of her constituents probably can't afford to travel to Queensland, Australia, anyway and those that can certainly won't be there while she is. So she's hardly going to where the people go.
But if Nadine thinks she's being clever by "going where the people go" because there'll be eleven million people watching her on telly, she's forgetting that they won't tune in to listen to her political views on abortion. Instead, they'll be wanting to watch her and fellow 'celebrities' making fools of themselves by swimming in guano in an effort to unlock a celebrity chest.
People tune in to these programmes in order to forget the politicians who have cocked up their lives; they won't want to hear a party political broadcast, they'll just want to see how long it takes her to scream for mercy after a rat is sent up the inside of her trouser leg.
I agree that MPs should go where the people are in order to get a better understanding of what is happening out here in the real world but, rather than trying to get to her constituents by spouting a message whilst chewing on a crocodile's severed member, she would be better going down to her local boozer and meeting up with real people to find out just what they need from her party.
That way, she wouldn't be suspended. She would be serving her community. And people might take her a little bit more seriously. Might...
Still, one thing that's certain is that Nadine Dorries' decision to fly out to Australia for this weekend's opening show will have caused the producers of BBC's Question Time a massive dilemma: how much time should they spend discussing Barack Obama's victory over Mitt Romney when there's a politician on a reality TV show getting so much publicity...?