Nadine Dorries: Best-selling author, nurse, reality star and, now, cabinet minister

Whatever your opinion of Dorries, her background is far from the norm for a Conservative MP. Born Nadine Bargery in Liverpool in 1957 to a Protestant mother, Sylvia, and an Irish immigrant Catholic father, George, she has described her childhood as warm and loving. But, the mother of three says she remembers a downside to working-class life in the ’60s and ’70s. “We used to hide from the rent man, as we couldn’t pay him,” she told the Guardian. “Some days there would be no food.”