As a young nurse, Nadine witnessed the horror of late abortions. Now an MP, she says the law MUST be changed

The reason he has stuck his neck out on such a contentious issue comes in the shape of a blonde whirlwind of a Conservative MP called Nadine Dorries, known as the "Bridget Jones of Westminster".

Dorries, MP for Mid Bedfordshire, is a ditsy-looking 50-year-old divorcee, with a passion for chocolate and Friday nights out with the girls.

Yet she is also a tough former nurse who has led a formidable campaign to lower the time limit for abortions since she became an MP in 2005.

Despite her perky good humour, her views on abortion have made her enemies at Westminster. Colleagues have warned her "Don't even touch it" and: "You are opening a can of worms."

Those who particularly dislike her are the group of Labour women who received money from "Emily's List" to get into politics.

Emily's List, headed by Barbara Follett - the Labour MP for Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, and wife of millionaire novelist Ken Follett - is a fund set up to encourage women to enter Parliament. The criterion for candidates getting the money is their declared support for abortion.

The Bridget Jones of Westminster: Tory MP Nadine Dorries

Dorries mischievously reported this "votes for sale" arrangement to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, who eventually rejected her complaint.

"I think the Standards Commissioner threw it out because (Home Secretary) Jacqui Smith was one of the women on Emily's List, and she was a Secretary of State - I think he was nobbled," Dorries says.

Then, in December, she bumped into Caroline Flint, the Labour Housing Minister, in the Commons tea room. "She went mad," says Dorries, with a bemused look on her face. "She flew at me. Well, I was brought up on a council estate - you don't fly at me or I'll nut you."

Flint demanded an apology from Dorries for having reported her and the other women on Emily's List.

"I said: 'Caroline, if you think that taking money to vote a particular way is something the Standards Commissioner should have thrown out then that is your opinion.'

"Caroline just dropped her sandwiches and flew out of the door. And I got a round of applause. Labour MPs came up to me and said: 'You should have decked her.'

"They told me: 'We call her the black widow. She would jump over anyone to get a job.' The vitriol from Labour MPs towards Caroline was unbelievable."

Dorries is contemptuous of the clique of Labour women who oppose her move to lower the time limit for legal abortion.

"They are not Labour women, they act like Labour men. They have no feeling. As far as they are concerned, it is all right to abort up to birth."

What gives Dorries moral authority on this particular subject is that she is a former nurse who assisted in abortions. She was 19 when she helped a doctor carry out abortions on a 24-week and even a 28-week foetus.

"In one instance, a hormone was injected into the mother to put her into spontaneous abortion. It was meant to be a dead baby."

What Dorries saw next shows just how quickly a baby can develop.

A group of Labour women, including Caroline Flint, declared support for abortion to receive money from 'Emily's List' to get into politics, Dorries claims

"The baby breathed. It was lying in a bedpan - it was a little boy and I saw him breathe. I said to the doctor: 'I am going to get the crash team (emergency resuscitation medics).'

"And he got hold of my wrist, pulled me into a cubicle and said: 'We are not on the labour ward. What are you doing?'

"He said that the only way I would be able to prove that the baby was alive was to drop him into a bucket of water and see if he floated! I ran out in tears.

"Later, the ward sister jabbed her finger at me and said: 'You should seriously think about whether you should be a nurse.'

"What got me was the total lack of regard for human life. I have no issue with abortion at the right time. But this is murder."

While she is campaigning for a 20-week limit now, Dorries would ideally like to see the limit reduced to the European level of 13 weeks. Recently, she watched an abortion at 19 weeks in a North London hospital.

"A baby aborted at 19 weeks is given a lethal injection into the heart. It is the most scary and unbelievably horrible thing to experience. This is Death Row.

"The needle goes into the heart and then the baby is left for 48 hours. The foetal monitor is checked until the heart stops."

Dorries assembled all the medical and scientific evidence to make her case for a reduction in the time limit, and then asked David Cameron to back her.

"David had the feeling that 24 weeks was too high - he is a dad, he has three children, he's seen his wife's scans, he knows what a foetus looks like. I brought him the evidence.

"He wanted to know what was driving me. We had a long conversation and then he said he would support me on a free vote.

"I said: 'That's great, but it is not good enough. What I need you to do is to say in public that you are supporting me.'"

Dorries says that if she succeeds in her amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, it will be her life's greatest achievement.

She is not a career politician but a woman of Thatcherite principles with a clear moral code. Born in Liverpool, she grew up on a council estate and was educated at a large comprehensive school.

Her father was a bus driver who developed a medical condition that led to the amputation of his toes. Refusing to give up work, he became the lift-man at Boots.

Nadine's parents divorced and she lived with her father while training as a nurse at the local hospital. She was 20 years old and dedicated to her vocation.

One day, she kissed her father goodbye as she set off to work for a week of night shifts, during which she stayed at the nurses' home.

At the end of the week she returned home to find the catch on the door and no answer from her father. Alarmed, she called the police.

"As they opened the door, I could see my dad's shoes and his coat by the fire. As the police walked into the sitting room I turned right into my dad's bedroom. He had been dead for days. It was awful."

Her father was just 42. Even worse, her younger brother - and only sibling - died in a road accident at the age of 25.

"My father was incredibly loving, sensitive and very funny in a typical Liverpudlian way. My mother has never really recovered."

Nadine does not like to dwell much on her life's misfortunes. Asked about her divorce from her businessman husband, Paul, she clams up, pleading that her three daughters (Philippa, 22, Jennifer, 21, and Cassie, 16) would not want it discussed in public.

But she takes a robust view of MPs complaining about their lot. "I see privilege in both parties. People here really don't understand what it is like not to have any money.

"They don't know what it is like to hide under the sink so the rent man can't see you - and that is what people are doing in council estates all over England."

Her first big scrap with the Tory hierarchy came over grammar schools. She was furious that education spokesman David Willetts gave a speech last year in which he opposed schools selection.

To Dorries, grammar schools - like Margaret Thatcher's council house right-to-buy scheme - were life-changing.

"We don't need classes of mixed ability because we know they don't work. Selection is what gave kids from my council estate a leg up. We need to select. That was my argument."

Dorries admits she had a "strong - very strong" conversation with David Willetts at the time.

I ask Dorries how she views the Etonian composition of the Tory front bench. Does she feel out of place in a party for "toffs"?

"Oh, I didn't have to get used to them. The Etonians had to get used to me. And they adapted beautifully. I don't think they quite knew how to take me when I first got here. I used to say: 'Oh God, you make me laugh.'"

Nadine Dorries's most endearing quality - and her most dangerous one - is saying what she thinks. When I visit her in her House of Commons office she is dressed in a black scoop-necked T-shirt, and is dipping into a tin of chocolate biscuits.

Her latest bugbear is the Government's relaxed approach to sex education.

"We have the highest number of sexually transmitted diseases in Europe. Yet Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, says we need sex education in primary schools.

"Surely sex education just encourages young people to have sex?"

I ask if she believes that today's generation of girls are more or less empowered than before feminism.

"Oh, they are worse off," she says bluntly. "Within weeks of becoming an MP, I went into the shop H&M with my daughter. There was a child model dressed in a thong and the one next to her was dressed in the clothes of a lapdancer.

"I am no prude - you should see my girls and what they wear when they go clubbing at night - but this was beyond tasteless.

"I wrote to the Advertising Association to ask: 'What are we doing?' We are destroying our girls and meanwhile the boys get off scotfree. It is the girls who get pregnant, the girls who get sexual diseases, the girls who are being disempowered."

Dorries built up her own medical business before becoming an MP. As a single parent, she is realistic about the lot of a working mother, saying there is no perfect solution to the work-life balance.

"We have to make our choices, don't we? My choice was to become an MP when my youngest daughter was 14. I thought that was the youngest age at which I could effectively do this job. I don't think we can change hundreds of years of Parliament.

"If women want to be MPs when they have young children, they are going to have to ask themselves: 'What sacrifices am I going to have to make to do this? Are these sacrifices I'm happy to make?'"

I point out that Cabinet Minister Yvette Cooper has three children under the age of ten. "I don't know how she does it. Hats off to her."

Sometimes, Dorries stays up until 3am to finish her work. "I know a lot of women who do that. And then you walk around looking knackered. I say to people: 'I so need a wife.'"

Yet she loves her work, all the more so because she was not brought up with the sense of entitlement felt by many on the Tory - and Labour - front benches.

"I walk in here and pinch myself. I think every day that someone will take it away from me, that it was just a dream."

Her Labour opponents say her moral campaign over abortion can be attributed to Right-wing Christian evangelism. "I try to live like a Christian. I try not to lie, to help others.

"That is what faith means to me - not preaching. But I do believe in evil and I see it here in attitudes to late abortion."

Much to the irritation of the Emily's List Labour women, Nadine Dorries is on the warpath and will sacrifice friendships, goodwill and possibly promotion in order to get what she believes in.

"If I could save 3,000 babies a year, it would mean everything," she says.

Then, quick as a flash, she snaps back into her Bridget Jones character. She puts on some lippy for the photographer, lets rip about the lack of eligible men in her life and prepares for her next girls' night out.