The National:

PEOPLE in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Unfortunately for Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, she seems to be trapped in a conservatory with a trebuchet.

The top Tory has found herself trending on Twitter for days after she proposed an Online Safety Bill which she claimed would “end abuse, full stop”.

Writing for the Daily Mail, Dorries said: “If it’s any kind of toxic content that breaks a social media company’s terms and conditions, whether hiding behind a fake name or not, it will have to be removed.”

However, it seems that a fair few of the Culture Secretary’s own tweets would fall foul of her new rules, as SNP MP John Nicolson pointed out to her at the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill.

READ MORE: 'Could sister marry sister?': The worst tweets from UK's new Culture Secretary

Dorries had previously told one reporter she would “nail your balls to the floor... using your own front teeth” after they asked how she could employ two of her daughters using public funds.

But Nicolson instead focused on another incident, where she had called LBC radio host James O'Brien a “public school posh boy f*ck wit”.

Ignoring the fact that Dorries herself said she sent two of her daughters to the same school O’Brien attended, the confrontation that followed is a masterclass in how not to obfuscate.

First Dorries claims she doesn’t remember the tweet, then she sets out to make herself the victim, before claiming the bill is actually important to fight “misinformation”, before finally moving back to positioning herself as the victim again.

Nicolson’s face when Dorries says that he has tweeted about her and “mentioned [her] name a couple of times in this committee hearing” is nothing short of brilliant.

Although that particular tweet about O’Brien has been deleted, it’s also not the only time the Culture Secretary has called someone a “f*ckwit” on Twitter.

The National:

It seems Dorries also likes to call people knobs.

The National:

The National:

Either way, that wasn’t the only exchange to come out of the committee hearing, as Nicolson also challenged Dorries on why she had retweeted a post from far-right leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who calls himself Tommy Robinson).

If Dorries didn’t know who Yaxley-Lennon was when she retweeted him on March 19, 2017, she can’t have been paying much attention. He became a prominent news figure long before that. Here he is being interviewed by Andrew Neil on the BBC in 2013 as just one example.

Either way, it would seem Twitter isn’t Dorries’ strongest point. She previously used the online platform to claim that Brexit had delivered “180,000 well-paid jobs” for Hartlepool - a town with a population of around half that number.

The National:

And she also went viral after complaining that that same Brexit deal would leave the UK with no MEPs…