Nadine Dorries will keep her job as culture secretary to resolve “unfinished business” with the BBC if Liz Truss becomes prime minister, according to reports.
An unknown source has told The Mail that only two current cabinet members are in line to keep their jobs – Dorries, and defence secretary Ben Wallace.
As Truss continues to gain support in the Conservative Party leadership contest against former chancellor Rishi Sunak, she has reportedly confirmed that Dorries is likely to stay where she is.
The sourse told the paper: “Only two names went on the early draft in the same positions they already held and stayed there – Nadine and Ben. Nadine in particular has a lot of unfinished business on her desk.”
Since her appointment to the position last September, Dorries – who once appeared on reality show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here while serving as an MP – has warned the BBC that the licence fee needs to be reformed because the “days of state-run television are over”.
Dorries has overseen proposed new legislation intended to curtail the power of social media giants, including the Online Safety Bill, which will impose a duty of care on tech giants to protect users against illegal or harmful content.
She has also called for the privatisation of Channel 4, overseen the sale of Chelsea Football Club and spoken in support of diverting arts funding to the regions.
The former nurse, and mother-of-three, is as known for her outspokenness as her policies, as well as her tendency to change her mind.
She argued and voted against gay marriage in 2013, dismissing it as a policy pursued “by the metro elite gay activists”, but since said that her opposition to the gay marriage bill was her “biggest regret”.
She once claimed that her political blog was “70% fiction”, after the MPs standards watchdog criticised it for potentially misleading constituents about how much time she spent in her constituency.
However, a week later she said that the blog was an accurate representation of life as an MP.
In July this year, amid a heated Commons debate, Dorries could be seen repeatedly shouting: “You’re boring”, at opposition leader Keir Starmer.
As part of her campaign to win the Tory leadership contest, Truss has pledged a crackdown on “woke” government policy, and has long made clear her intention to stand up to left-wingers who may oppose her views.
In June she told group of Conservative MPs that she was “fed up” of being “apologetic to the left”, and Dorries too has publicly scorned cancel culture and overt political correctness.
In 2017, she tweeted: “Left wing snowflakes are killing comedy, tearing down historic statues, removing books from universities, dumbing down panto, removing Christ from Christmas and suppressing free speech. Sadly, it must be true, history does repeat itself. It will be music next.”
As a staunch supporter of Boris Johnson, she has kept her place in cabinet, and it appears she may not be going anywhere any time soon.
In July she made her support of Truss clear when she attacked Sunak for his expensive tastes.
She tweeted: “Liz Truss will be travelling the country wearing her earrings which cost circa £4.50 from Claire Accessories. Meanwhile… Rishi visits [Teesside] in Prada shoes worth £450 and sported [a] £3,500 bespoke suit as he prepared for crunch leadership vote.”
As aid organisations mobilise to provide relief for victims of Pakistan's catastrophic floods, one group of women is focused on a necessity that is frequently taboo in the conservative Islamic nation — menstrual hygiene products.
India is likely to receive 9% more rainfall than the average in September, the weather office said on Thursday, although uneven distribution could trim yields of summer-sown crops in Asia's third biggest economy that relies on farming to boost growth and generate jobs. "Normal to above normal rainfall probability is likely over most parts of India except many parts northeast India, and some parts of east and northwest India where below normal rainfall is likely," the state-run India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in a statement. Cotton, soybean and pulses growing regions in central and western India could get significantly more rainfall than the average, while rice growing eastern and north-eastern regions could get below-normal rainfall, the IMD said.
Volkswagen on Thursday hands over the reins to new CEO Oliver Blume, tasked with steering the German automotive giant through challenging economic conditions after four turbulent years under his predecessor, Herbert Diess.
Hong Kong batsman Kinchit Shah usually handles the family diamond business and he sparkled in a losing cause against India, studding an innings of 30 with two fours and a six in the T20 Asia Cup.
The stars appear to be aligned for NASA's Moon rocket to finally blast off on Saturday, with weather forecasts favorable and technical issues that postponed the launch earlier this week resolved.
United Nations head Antonio Guterres urged China Thursday to follow the recommendations of a UN report that found credible allegations of torture and forced labor in Xinjiang province.
Indian shares ended mostly unchanged on Friday, after a choppy trading session, ahead of a critical U.S. jobs data that would provide clues on the Federal Reserve's future rate hike strategy. The NSE Nifty 50 index closed down 0.02% at 17,539.45, while the S&P BSE Sensex rose 0.06% to 58,803.33.
Volodymyr is celebrating a major milestone on Wednesday — it's his final day of taking a new treatment hailed as a turning point in the fight against drug-resistant tuberculosis.
Goldman Sachs has revised lower its growth projections for India after the April-June quarterly gross domestic product readings missed market estimates. The lower-than-expected growth during April-June created downside risk of 40 basis points to current fiscal year growth estimates, Morgan Stanley said in a note.
Pakistan's Anti-Terrorism Court extended interim bail Thursday for former prime minister Imran Khan in a case surrounding comments he made about a judge involved in the detention of an official in his party.
BENGALURU (Reuters) -Shares of India's SpiceJet Ltd tumbled nearly 15% on Thursday to a one-month low, after the low-cost carrier posted a bigger quarterly loss due to higher fuel costs and unfavourable foreign currency rates, and said its finance chief had resigned. SpiceJet on Wednesday reported a net loss of 7.84 billion rupees ($98.50 million) for the quarter ended June 30, compared with a loss of 7.31 billion rupees a year earlier. Last month, Reuters reported lenders IDFC First Bank, Yes Bank and Indian Bank had put their loans to SpiceJet in the high-risk category.
The organisation added that they tried to appeal to Dota 2 developer Valve Software but were denied. Here's what they said.
A new hormone treatment improved the cognitive function of six men with Down Syndrome by 10-30 percent, scientists said Thursday, adding the "promising" results may raise hopes of improving patients' quality of life.
The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world's biggest vaccine maker, has developed the country's first cervical cancer shot that will hit the market soon, the company and the government said on Thursday. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer among women globally, with an estimated 604,000 new cases and 342,000 deaths in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. Two human papillomavirus (HPV) types, 16 and 18, are responsible for at least 70% of cervical cancers, and India's Department of Biotechnology said the Indian vaccine would work on HPV types 16 and 18, as well as 6 and 11.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral of the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev due to scheduling issues, his spokesman said on Thursday.
Singapore shuttler Loh Kean Yew suffered a narrow defeat by India's HS Prannoy in the last-16 of the Japan Open on Thursday (1 September).
Rosmah Mansor, Malaysia's former first lady who was found guilty of graft on Thursday, has been widely mocked in the past over her reported taste for luxury, and is routinely portrayed as being out of touch with ordinary citizens.
An increasingly high-stakes standoff between Donald Trump and US federal investigators landed in court Thursday, after days of headline-grabbing revelations surrounding highly classified documents seized by the FBI from the former president's Florida home.
Indian rocket startup Skyroot Aerospace said on Friday it had raised $51 million in a funding round led by Singapore sovereign investor GIC, which it plans to use to begin commercial satellite launches by the middle of next year. The funding follows the Indian government's push to get the country's private sector to complement its state-run space programme known for its affordable launches and missions. India's unmanned Mars mission in 2014 cost only $74 million, less than the budget of the Hollywood space movie "Gravity".
Cate Blanchett's powerful female, gender-fluid and gay roles have helped transform Hollywood, but she told Venice on Thursday that she never sets out to make a political statement.