Ms Dorries added her department was also ‘responsible for everything to do with sport, making sure you’ve got football pitches and that you have tennis pitches in your communities where you can play and exercise your sport’.
Her clumsy phrasing was seized on by trolls on social media. One said: ‘Dear Nadine, I’ve spent the whole night trying to downstream a tennis pitch on the British internet without success.’
Another said: ‘Questions are again being raised about the competence of Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. The major gaps in her knowledge appear to be around the areas of culture, media and sport.’
But last night Ms Dorries, a best-selling novelist, said: ‘I have dyslexia, which means that when I speak I often run my words together and say things that sound like the words I’m trying to say.
‘It affects my speech more than my writing, which is why I find solace in writing.’
She said she ‘found it tough seeing commentators and media outlets mock me for something that is beyond my control’.
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