Caroline Wheeler, Political Editor
The Sunday Times
March 02 2024
Andrew Bridgen was in Sweden speaking at an event hosted by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s antivax group while his young son was at home facing a medical crisis.
The former Conservative MP, who has become a leading voice in the global campaign against vaccinations, ignored frantic calls from his wife, Nevena, as their five-year-old’s health deteriorated, she claims.
Nevena, whose family hail from Serbia, was alone in London with her sick child, going backwards and forwards to the hospital, while she says her husband was on the streets of Sweden “acting as an antivax revolutionary and neglecting his son during a health emergency”.
It was the moment Nevena, 43, finally concluded that her husband had been captured by what she considers a“cult”.
Today, she reveals how her marriage and life have been torn apart by a “sect” she claims has “taken over” her husband.
She said: “The first alarming sign of radicalisation was when it was obvious that he was turning on us, when our child got terribly ill … There was no way of pleading with him. The human cost of radicalisation and the devastating impact it can have on individuals and their families, and in this case, our family, was spelled out for me for the first time in bold colours.”
Nevena, a classically-trained opera singer, who filed for divorce this month, claims she and her son have been left homeless after her marriage to Bridgen, 59, broke down and he “abandoned them”.
She also criticises the Conservative Party and the parliamentary authorities for failing to protect him from “radicalisation”.
In January last year he was suspended from the party after sharing a post on Twitter/X comparing Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust. A few months later he was permanently expelled and now serves as an independent MP for North West Leicestershire.
Her interview paints a picture of the paranoia and misinformation that fuels the antivax movement. She alleges her husband was told by his new friends to cut her adrift because she was an MI6 spy.
Speaking in a hotel by the Palace of Westminster, where she once rubbed shoulders with prime ministers and senior members of the government, Nevena said: “The antivax conspiracy theorist movement destroyed my life when Andrew became their foot soldier.”
She claims that he is willing to put indoctrination and the extremist ideology of the movement above his wife and an innocent child. She believes he needed to “get rid of her” as she did not “fully align with his extremist beliefs”.
“I watched my life shatter into pieces as I lost access to the household bank account … and kicked out on the street with a child just in time for Christmas,” she said.
Bridgen is building “Andrew’s Army” to mobilise support for him and his antivax views before the general election. He launched a website last week urging people to become his “foot soldiers” to help him “overturn the old political order”.
“Being a phone soldier in Andrew’s Army will require courage,” he writes. “It will not be for the faint-hearted. But if you share my convictions about the issues I raise and you want to ensure I can get through to my constituents despite the ever intensifying attempts to cancel me, become a phone soldier in Andrew’s Army today.”
Bridgen appears to have become radicalised to the antivax cause over several years. He has tweeted about the Covid-19 jab more than 100 times since 2022, when he first began to warn of alleged vaccine harms. After previously encouraging his social media followers to get vaccinated, he advocated for a “common sense” approach — opposing booster jabs for anyone over the age of 12.
By July 2022, his position had begun to harden. He warned on Twitter/X that “no one outside a vulnerable group should be boosted. No healthy children should be vaccinated.” In December that year, Bridgen called for the vaccine to be suspended.
A few months into 2023, Bridgen began to slip into conspiracy theories. Posting on Twitter/X in September, he claimed that Pfizer had “switched” the medically approved vaccine for an untested variant. Later, he alleged the vaccines were “defective”.
Last February, he hosted a dinner at the exclusive Carlton Club, from where he is allegedly now banned, for “vaccine sceptics”. They included John Mappin, a hotelier in Cornwall who said that mask-wearing and the jabs rollout were a “holocaust of the mind” and claimed the Duke of Edinburgh died as a result of being vaccinated. Robert Malone, a vaccine-sceptic doctor, was invited to give “evidence of the harms that the injections have done to innocent civilians”.
Bridgen has since shared a platform with Meryl Nass, who had her licence as a doctor in the US state of Maine suspended during the pandemic over the sharing of misinformation, and Philipp Kruse, a Swiss lawyer associated with an anti-vaccine group.
He has brought his views to Westminster. In an outburst in the Commons last week, Bridgen asked for a debate on “crimes against humanity and the appropriate punishment for those who perpetrate, collude in and cover up atrocities and crimes so severe that the ultimate punishment may be required”.
In response, Penny Mordaunt, leader of the House of Commons, cautioned him to “reflect on his own behaviour and what he does on social media, and on the security measures that have had to be stepped up for MPs in the wake of some of his social media tweets and questions”. She added: “I am going to call out, on every occasion, when he does things that I think are a danger to our democracy.”
Nevena claims Bridgen is a different man to the one she met more than seven years ago when she was at the height of her success as an international opera singer.
Her first steps towards a singing career began in 1999 when she was 18 years old in the bomb shelters of Belgrade. Her talent was spotted by a professor at the Belgrade music academy, who offered to give the promising young soprano some lessons if they managed to leave the shelter alive. She eventually completed her formal training in Serbia before studying for a master’s degree at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She lived in the British capital, where her sister, Ksenija, was a student at the London School of Economics, for a further six years before returning to the national opera in Belgrade in 2014.
Two years later, during a brief trip to London, she was introduced to Bridgen by a mutual acquaintance. She was in rehearsals for a new production of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, in which she was playing a leading role. Back in Belgrade, Nevena struck up an increasingly close friendship with Bridgen over long telephone calls and he offered to come to Belgrade in late 2016 to see her perform.
Nevena recalled: “It was a great surprise to me because he has never been to Belgrade, he’d never been to Serbia, and I thought it was very brave to sit on the plane and just come. But we clicked and we became very close over a very short period of time and it really felt like there was a connection; we both wanted the same things out of life in terms of wanting to have a family, wanting to have a relationship and something meaningful.”
In April 2017, Bridgen proposed in the heart of Belgrade’s old town. They married in the Serbian capital later that month and Nevena moved to England in the summer. Their son was born on September 8, 2018, but the cracks had begun to appear. It was the height of the fallout from Brexit and the stress appeared to take its toll on Bridgen.
Nevena claims that during her lengthy labour he told her she was “not a spring chicken” and, the moment they arrived home from hospital, he rushed off to meet Theresa May.
With Bridgen often away at work, Nevena said she felt like a “single parent who was married”. Prevented from working here and unable to drive his car, she grew to feel completely dependent on her husband, who gave her a limited monthly allowance for her and her baby to live on. She also relied on a small salary from her work as an opera singer in Belgrade, which she was forced to give up when her son began school.
While being married to Bridgen meant she was invited to high-profile events and was introduced to several prime ministers, Nevena still felt isolated. She decided to set up her own support group and lifestyle blog, the Wives of Westminster, intended to be a vehicle for female empowerment.
The couple were also mired in a legal battle with Bridgen’s younger brother, Paul. The dispute was over the Bridgen family business, AB Produce, which supplies potatoes and other vegetables to catering companies. In 2022, the MP and his family were ordered to vacate his £1.5 million constituency home with a swimming pool and stables, set in 5.5 acres in the Leicestershire village of Coleorton.
Bridgen was eventually forced to borrow at least £3.9 million from a former Tory donor to help fund the legal battle. “We were always under pressure,” said Nevena. “It was really tough but there was always this promise of a normal life and that there would be a silver lining.”
Instead, Bridgen began to descend into antivax conspiracies. An early lockdown sceptic, he then turned to so-called vaccine “damages”. The Independent reported that he badgered government ministers for months over the issue. He also frequently retweeted claims by Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist and anti-vaccine campaigner who has been accused of promoting misleading information about the safety of Covid vaccines, after the pair met at the launch of the all-party parliamentary group on Covid-19 vaccine damage in July 2022.
In a Commons adjournment debate before Christmas 2022, Bridgen reiterated his call for vaccinations to end: “Three months ago, one of the most eminent and trusted cardiologists, a man with an international reputation, Dr Aseem Malhotra, published peer-reviewed research that concluded that there should be a complete cessation of the administration of the Covid mRNA vaccines for everyone because of clear and robust data of significant harms and little ongoing benefit.”
Bridgen said that a senior British Heart Foundation figure was involved in “covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries” — something the charity “categorically” denied.
Bridgen, who is understood to deny belonging to or being associated with any “sect” or “cult”, says that this work is aimed at safeguarding the health and safety of the constituents who voted for him.
The first “red flag” for Nevena came when she heard him speaking to a group on a Zoom call while at her sister’s flat in Washington DC during the Christmas holidays in 2022. She said it was the first sign she saw he was being influenced.
“It was crazy, they were talking about crimes against humanity and someone saying that this was all done to eradicate the population,” she said. “They went on to say something along the lines of ‘You have to do your job now and call out the mainstream media and tell people the truth. This is your mission.’ The person spoke of a global military alliance. They were basically encouraging insurrection and saying the military should take this into their own hands.”
After he finished the call, she says she demanded that he stop. She asked him how he could put himself in a position like this, because they could have been recording him to use as blackmail. “I was trying to offer him advice but he didn’t take it.”
Days after parliament returned in January 2023, Bridgen was suspended from the Conservative Party after tweeting a vaccine efficacy chart with the caption: “As one consultant said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”
In April, he was permanently expelled, joining Laurence Fox’s right-wing Reclaim Party a month later but leaving in December.
Nevena claims being ousted from the Tories sealed her family’s fate. “The Conservative Party didn’t deal with this properly,” she alleges. “They didn’t pick up the early signs of indoctrination and radicalisation. The way they dealt with him was to cancel him — and that was the moment it opened the doors for all these people to come in.
“Suddenly there were all these people coming into our lives and taking over. There is this parallel reality that is very present out there. And I’m in the middle of it all trying desperately to keep our family together.”
Nevena believes Bridgen is unlikely to be the last MP to be targeted by conspiracy theorist groups. “There is no system to protect MPs from these kinds of things,” she said. “They [the Conservative Party] just accelerated his radicalisation and pushed him further down the road. Once he was out of the Conservative Party, he was a free agent, a target of the ‘antivax cult’. And now he’s not just an MP any more, he’s also the international leader of these groups.”
Nevena claims Bridgen would frequently meet antivax “whistleblowers” in the middle of the night. “There was no longer time for me or his child,” she said. “He just spent time with these people and then he would come home and dump all this paralysing fear on me, telling me that we were all going to die in five years’ time. If I refused to listen he would get aggravated. I became a person he no longer trusted.”
Nevena claims the “scales [finally] fell” from her eyes last autumn when he attended the conference, arranged by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s antivax group Children’s Health Defense, in Sweden. During his absence the couple’s son became unwell and his health quickly deteriorated. She claims that despite repeated attempts to ask Bridgen to return home, he did not — even as his son lay gravely ill in hospital.
Facebook posts show Bridgen speaking at events and enjoying dinners in Sweden. “That was the moment where I felt he was putting the ideology before the health and wellbeing of his child and showed the full neglect of his parental responsibilities,” Nevena said.
When Bridgen returned home after more than a week’s absence, Nevena confronted him about his behaviour. His response shocked her. She claims he told her that the whole of “humanity was at stake” and if he succeeded he would be saving the world — something he hoped his son would one day be proud of. Nevena said: “I felt like I was in that Matrix film and that he was telling me he was the chosen one. Except this is not a blockbuster movie, this is my life.”
Not long afterwards, she claims Bridgen convinced her to give up the tenancy on their Westminster taxpayer-funded flat to look for a new home. The couple signed the lease on a new flat not long before Nevena flew back to Belgrade for her aunt’s funeral. She claims that on the day of the funeral, Bridgen texted Nevena to say he had cancelled the lease on the new flat — effectively leaving her and her son homeless. He also blocked her number, leaving her no way to contact him.
She claims the only money she had was £1,200 he had transferred into her personal account, although Bridgen claims she has always had access to her own funds.
“I was slowly rolling into homelessness because on December 21 our tenancy would run out on the existing Westminster flat and we had nowhere else to go,” she said. Bridgen disputes this account of events last year.
Nevena believes Bridgen wanted to force her and her son, who is British and in full-time education here, to return to Belgrade. “He knows I can’t rent because I don’t have the money to put down a deposit.”
Nevena began talking to charities about finding a homeless shelter and signing up for universal credit.Bridgen insists he has never stopped any payments for his son.“The last three prime ministers and half of the government were sending cards and congratulations to celebrate the birth of our child,” Nevena said. “I was supposed to be part of a political circle and a community who knew me and my child since the day he was born and yet I found myself about to be put out on the street with absolutely no support.”
Nevena’s sister came to her rescue. She cashed in her life savings and put down a year’s rent on a flat for Nevena and her son so they could remain in London. They only have a few pieces of furniture.
Nevena is now looking for a job and claiming benefits, while Bridgen pays her a monthly sum towards the upkeep of their child. He does not pay towards Nevena’s living costs and claims she still has access to her small salary as an opera singer — something she disputes.
In contrast, Bridgen still lives with all the trappings of an MP’s lifestyle. In mid-December, he won his case against his brother and claims he will soon be the 100 per cent shareholder of the multimillion-pound business.
Of the conspiracy theories that Nevena believes drove a wedge between her and Bridgen, she says: “Parliament doesn’t have the systems in place to deal with things like that and to guard MPs against it. They didn’t recognise it and they let him slide into this. I was fighting the cult and now me and my child are the collateral.”
The Conservative Party was contacted for a response but declined comment. However, a source questioned what action the party could have taken.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/248c1402-a3cb-47c8-bcc6-34ecd1002874?shareToken=fe0c8a194d76cb26fb58712ae83300e2&fbclid=IwAR0ul-RewkVFc2HayG_LdocxQqDJar8Ke_gBfF3yi6VIHfN59K1o7wkmKgA
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