So Dave, how do you solve a problem like Nadine Dorries? I might take seriously her accusation that the Prime Minister and his Chancellor are criminally uninterested in the lives of others were it not for the fact that Dorries seems only to be interested in herself. She is the queen of self-promotion. In a 2007 interview, she told a journalist that "if we were in government and David didn't give me a front bench position, I would barricade myself inside his office until he did." But her constituency is set to disappear when boundary changes are introduced during the next election and, as such, all this rather smacks of a disgruntled politician whose ambitions have been thwarted, rather than someone who is genuinely bothered about "the lives of others." How in touch with reality is Dorries anyway? She was cleared of making illegal claims after the expenses scandal, but forced to admit that the blog she wrote for her constituents was "70 per cent fiction and 30 per cent fact." The whole expenses episode was, she said at the time, "completely unbearable" - not for the voters, but for her. So traumatised by this public scrutiny was Dorries that when, several months later, she assisted at a road accident, she claimed to be too frightened to identify herself as an MP in case people "lost trust" in her. Why one's occupation should matter at the scene of an accident - unless, of course, you are a doctor - is beyond me, but then, most of Dorries's reasoning is. Mad Nad doesn't just go for posh boys, though. During the 2010 election, she cast doubt over her Labour opponent's claims that he had served in Iraq. "Did he go out in the danger zones," she asked of David Reeves, "and risk his life and limb side by side with our soldiers, for the sake of freedom and democracy? The values for which he claims to have 'fought in Iraq. I will be interested to find out the answer. Claiming to be a hero... is a very big claim indeed... let's hope it's true. Mr Reeves had been stationed in Basra between June 2003 and January 2004, flying on surveillance missions in Nimrod aircraft and patrolling the southern Iraq city. On one occasion, he was attacked by a mob. It may be true that Cameron and Osborne are not completely au fait with all sections of society, but at least they're not living on another planet entirely. The last great female taboo One of the last great taboos as a woman is to admit that you don't want children. Witness the hostile reaction to Lucy Worsley's disclosure that she had been "educated out of the natural reproductive function." In an interview with Radio Times, she also said: "I get to spend my time doing things I enjoy. I don't think my life is wasted. It seems to fascinate people. I have become the poster girl for opting out of reproduction. Some have interpreted this as being Worsley's way of saying that clever women don't have children. Patently, that is not true, but I do think that clever women should ask themselves whether or not they want children. Too often, it is simply presumed that if you have a womb, you will one day want to grow a baby in it, in a sort of "it's there, so you might as well use it!" way. I really, really want children. My best friend really, really doesn't. When I asked her why, many years ago, she just shrugged. "Ever since I was a girl," she said, "I have known that I would rather rip out my fallopian tubes and hang myself from the roof of Mothercare with them than become a mum." The poor woman gets asked more than is reasonably polite why she doesn't want to "sprog." I witnessed one 42-year-old man - he had no children but a penchant for women barely out of their teens - berate her in a bar for lacking maternal instinct. "But why?" he shouted, banging a pint of beer down on the table. All women want children! And actually, my friend can't always say why it is ("it just is") - though she has often commented that she feels no envy for women who spend their entire twenties trying not to get pregnant, and their thirties doing the opposite. It is a sort of madness that I am thankful not to suffer from. I keep hearing about the world being vastly overpopulated. And yet still people seem to look oddly on a woman who chooses not to have children. Should we really be asking why the likes of Worsley don't want children? Should we not instead be asking why we do? Hunt is silent on the Take That and party email I think one of the most troubling emails sent by News Corp lobbyist Frederic Michel to Adam Smith, freshly resigned adviser to Jeremy Hunt, is the one that read: "By the way, does that mean you and Jeremy will not be coming to Take That on July 4th?" Shouldn't they be trying to woo our Culture Secretary at the Royal Opera House or Glyndebourne? Could it be that the apogee of Jeremy Hunt's musical tastes is a band whose first music video featured them half naked and covered in jelly? And did Jeremy take up the invitation? Amber Elliott, political editor of Total Politics magazine, tweeted this week that she saw Take That on July 6 and was "pretty sure" she had seen Jeremy Hunt there - or a very good lookalike - in a hospitality box. "Emailed his people to check," she continued. They said it wasn't in his diary. Let us hope that when Hunt comes up before the Leveson Inquiry, the Lord Justice will get to the bottom of this sorry saga. In the meantime, a prize for the first person to spot Eric Pickles at a One Direction concert, or Ken Clarke getting on down to Justin Bieber. Over here and making off with our porcini Those blasted Poles, coming over here, stealing all of our porcini mushrooms. The author Ian McEwan has bemoaned the lack of fungi to pick in the UK, blaming the influx of Polish people who forage them away first. "They're much more expert," he told the New Yorker magazine. The further east you go across Europe, the more expert ordinary people are about mushrooms. Porcini mushrooms, a Booker-prize winning novelist and immigration: could this be the most middle-class story ever to have been told?