TikTok TV star with a thirst for attention
CAN it be only a year or so ago that Dehenna Davison took her rescue puppy Carter on a ‘playdate’ with Dilyn, the unruly Downing Street terrier? Back then, the newly minted MP for Bishop Auckland was one of Boris Johnson’s golden girls – and besties with the then Carrie Symonds.
The Prime Minister’s fiancee had even joined the campaign trail to help get Davison elected in 2019 and the MP later posted cosy pictures of the two of them on Twitter with the hashtag #ToryGirlSquad.
Davison’s commitment to Boris Johnson was said to be ‘unfaltering’. Post-Partygate, things look very different. Ruthless betrayal is part of Westminster politics and Davison, 28, now stands accused by party sources of ‘madly whipping up the Red Wallers’.
While she hotly denies a rumour that she will be the next Tory MP to defect to Labour – calling such talk ‘complete bulls***’ – she is suspected of being a ringleader of the so-called ‘Pork Pie Plot’.
Perhaps the PM should have always been wary: Davison isn’t a conventional MP.
She has shared a video of herself – plucking her eyebrows and putting on make-up while lip-synching to Taylor Swift’s Ready For It? – on TikTok. On her office wall, she even displays a mock ‘eye test’ chart featuring Barnard Castle – where Boris’s ex-aide Dominic Cummings drove to ‘test his eyesight’ in the first lockdown – spelt out in ever-smaller letters.
And her personal life is... interesting. At 24, she married a Conservative councillor 35 years her senior and appeared with him on a reality TV show, Bride and Prejudice. They are now getting divorced and she recently declared herself bisexual, the first female MP to do so.
Some think Davison one of the brightest of the so-called 2019-ers. The daughter of a stonemason and a nursery nurse, she grew up on a Sheffield council estate but – urged by a primary school head teacher who arranged for her to take the exam – won a full scholarship to the independent Sheffield High School.
Her life was shaped by tragedy two years later as a 13year-old, when her 35-yearold father was killed by a single punch to the head in a pub.
‘The news didn’t have to be broken [to me],’ Davison said later. ‘My mum had been there while they tried to resuscitate him and she came into the room – I can still remember the look on her face.’ The man who killed him stood trial but claimed he had been hit first – and witnesses were divided. Though convicted of manslaughter, the killer never served time for Mr Davison’s death (having spent 18 months in prison on a separate assault charge).
THREE years later, Davison had to represent the family at a criminal injuries compensation tribunal because they could not afford a lawyer.
That seems to have sparked her interest in politics.
She was drawn to the Conservative Party because ‘when
I thought about it, my core values – what made me – it was things like, if you want to get on in life you have to stand on your own two feet’.
She spent a year working for Jacob Rees-Mogg while studying politics at Hull University.
Her maiden speech as an MP quoted both Del Boy and the Harry Potter character Albus Dumbledore. Not surprisingly, one of her early initiatives was to form an all-party group to look at sentencing for onepunch assaults.
She is a passionate Brexiteer and co-presents the Sunday morning show The Political Correction with Nigel Farage on the ‘anti-woke’ TV station GB News – a source of great irritation to many Tory MPs.
‘Dehenna has been told she is giving the oxygen of publicity to Farage, who is an enemy of the Tories,’ said one senior MP. ‘But she doesn’t listen because she thinks she knows best.’
As one of the youngest MPs at Westminster, she has enjoyed a high media profile. Some believe the publicity has gone to her head.
‘Loyalty is an important attribute in politics,’ another senior colleague said last night. ‘She won’t be taking many MPs with her as most of us are laughing at her behind her back.’