THE Conservative MP Nadine Dorries has said that she was sexually abused as a child by her Anglican priest in Liverpool.

Mrs Dorries, who has often been vocal about her Christian faith, made the allegations in an interview to promote her latest novel, The Ballymara Road, in her Four Streets trilogy. She told the Mail on Sunday that the stories of sexual abuse within her novels were based on her own experiences.

The new novel includes a character by the name of James Cameron - which, Mrs Dorries has now said, is the name of the clergyman who exploited her as a nine-year-old girl in Liverpool during the 1960s.

She said that Mr Cameron, who was curate at St Mary's, Halewood, in the diocese of Liverpool, between 1964 and 1968, invited her to the vicarage on the pretence of showing her his stamp collection, but instead forced her to look at graphic photographs of him and his wife having sex.

Later, be began making social calls to Mrs Dorries's home. "Once I woke up in the night to find him performing a sex act near me. 

"Another time when he was kneeling at the side of my bed he exposed himself," she said. "He spoke to me but what he said was too disgusting for me to even write.

"I didn't know what sex was - I was only nine. But I remember thinking it was bad and wrong."

She never told anyone about the abuse, fearing she would not be believed. But when she came to write her novels she decided to include Mr Cameron's name as an act of defiance of the cleric.

"I knew I was going to get my revenge on the vicar," she said. "I remember thinking, 'I want you to know that I'm writing about you; it's unmistakable and that through these three books I am going to make you suffer.'"

She later found out, however, that Mr Cameron had died in 2011, before her first novel was published. In the 1970s, he was an industrial chaplain in the diocese of Liverpool, before becoming an officer on the Board of Education. He ended his career as a parish priest in Norfolk.

The Bishop of Durham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, who leads the Church of England's safeguarding work, said that any abuse within the Church was a matter of "deep shame and regret".

"We will be working with statutory authorities and others in Liverpool to carry out a full investigation. I would urge anyone who may have any information relating to this matter to contact the police or other statutory authorities."