“It is a very long resignation letter,” Blake Stephenson, chairman of Mid-Bedfordshire Conservatives, told the BBC, discussing Nadine Dorries’ final epistle to the Sunakians. “I wonder if it’s the longest in history.”

The apostle had less to get off his chest than St Nadine

In one of the odd constitutional conventions that make Britain the great country that it is, the formal process for Dorries finally leaving her seat in parliament was to publish a letter in the Mail on Sunday. It began “Dear Prime Minister,” but it was unclear if Rishi Sunak had actually been sent a copy, or whether Dorries was simply confident the Mail newsdesk would pass the key points along.

The full letter came in just shy of 1,800 words. That’s a little longer than St Paul’s note to the Philippians, but then the apostle had less to get off his chest than St Nadine. Or perhaps she was being paid by the word. Having finally given up her MP’s salary, it would be tempting to try to pad the wordcount a bit to help cover the next Ocado bill.

Reading the letter, the thought occurred that Dorries might have posted it months ago only for staff at Downing Street, missing the significance of her signature, to file it with the other letters they receive each day from people who believe that they have discovered vast shadowy conspiracies at the heart of the government, or that the prime minister is personally coordinating a vendetta against them.

This, Dorries explained in a filmed Mail interview that accompanied her letter, was the only possible explanation for the steady flow of questions about why somebody who announced in June that they were resigning “with immediate effect” was still in their post at the end of August.

It was, she said, “nonsense” to suggest that she had been bunking off from her day job for the last few months. “I had a team of very professional caseworkers who have been working very diligently throughout the summer,” she said. “As have I,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

The question that comes to mind whenever Dorries is speaking is whether she can hear the words coming out of her mouth. At one point in her Mail on Sunday interview, she complained about getting death threats, then attacked MPs who complain about getting death threats, and then explained that in her particular case, the death threats had been really bad ones that she was entitled to complain about. Even as you tried to make sense of this, she was onto the next topic, her forthcoming book about how we’re being governed by an “undemocratic cabal”.

Does he have a side-hustle as a wedding photographer?

Sunak, she explained, was “un-Conservative” because he’d helped to get rid of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Although whatever contribution he made to the end of their governments was as nothing compared to their own Herculean efforts at self-destruction. And of course there is nothing more closely aligned to the spirit of the Conservative Party than dumping a prime minister because they look like a loser.

Listening to all this was to be swept away on the tide of Dorries’s consciousness, her thoughts flowing first this way and then that. As with a swimmer caught in such currents, it was vital not to exhaust yourself trying to understand it or fight against it. Instead all we could do was keep our heads above water and hope to float clear.

Her letter contained its own gems. “I am grateful for your personal phone call on the morning you appointed your cabinet in October,” she told Sunak. “Even if I declined to take the call.” In a baffling line of description, she complained that when she’d taken the concerns of business leaders to him, “you flashed your gleaming smile in your Prada shoes and Savile Row suit from behind a camera, but you just weren’t listening.” Why was Sunak behind a camera when she spoke to him? Does he have a side-hustle as a wedding photographer? Perhaps her book will explain all this.

Anyway, she told the Mail, she’d had enough, and she was off, even though many people – top people, people you heard of, people she couldn’t name – had been “begging” her not to resign and call a by-election.

The BBC put this idea to her constituency chairman. “I’m not one of those people,” Stephenson began. “Individuals may have been calling her to ask her to stay,” he went on with the same carefully polite tone he might have used when discussing the possibility that a constituent had been taken on board an alien mothership to discuss plans for galactic peace. However, he added, “I’m not aware of those conversations.”