Nadine Dorries hides out in lawless London

A person who gets their news exclusively through the pages of the Daily Mail, would have a very clear view of London: it’s a lawless hellhole where police are scared to tread, and Sadiq Khan’s sharia courts rule the roost.

“The truth about Sadiq Khan’s Lawless London”, ran one such headline in April this year, the paper approvingly quoting Susan Hall, the hapless Tory defeated by Khan in 2024, categorising the capital as “youths running amok, shoplifting, hurting police officers”. Similarly, it quoted a White House spokesperson who said: “Left-wing policies have made once-great cities like London unrecognisable”.

The previous week, the Mail ran the headline “A week in Sadiq Khan’s London: A pensioner stabbed to death on her doorstep, teenagers looting shops and Tube crime up 46% after the pandemic… but Mayor still insists the capital is a ‘safe city’.”

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“With teenagers rampaging through high streets, young people openly vaping on trains and an elderly woman stabbed to death outside her home in recent days, the moniker ‘lawless London’ has never seemed more apt,” reported deputy chief reporter Mark Duell.

The very same week it was reporting how “Sadiq Khan’s failure to tackle crime is to blame for Clapham mob attack, says M&S boss”, approvingly quoting retail director Thinus Keeve as saying, after a mob of youths targeted a store in south London, that, “I keep hearing crime is falling, especially in London – something none of us believes, and very few people working in retail would see”.

Duell had been on the capital’s beat back in January, writing under the headline: “How safe is London? Sadiq Khan’s boast over record low homicide rate doesn’t show the reality, opponents claim – as statistics reveal surge in crime residents face every day”.

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“Sir Sadiq Khan’s claim that London is ‘safer than ever’ is based on ‘cherry-picked’ data that does not represent day-to-day reality in the capital,” he told Mail readers.

So what was Nadine Dorries writing in the Mail this weekend after the horrific murder of her friend and former Conservative colleague Ann Widdecombe?

“I’m so afraid I plan to lock up my cottage, return to London – and stay there until Ann Widdecombe’s killer is behind bars,” ran the headline over her article in which she outlined her plans to “pack a case, lock the door of my cottage in the Cotswolds and return to London and the safety of numbers”.