Has Nadine Dorries lost the plot? Her bizarre book blames Boris's fall on ‘Dr No’ and ‘the Wolf’
It’s all perfectly simple. Boris Johnson was brought down by a secretive cabal called the Movement, impelled by the powerful figures Dr No, the Wolf, the Dark Lord and Michael Gove.
The Dark Lord is Dominic Cummings and the Wolf is someone called Dougie Smith. If you have never heard of him, that proves how secretive it all is. Everyone was scared of Dr No, though his name was never mentioned – a bit like Voldemort, though Nadine Dorries reserves that comparison for Michael Gove.
Amid soft sofas, soothed by shortbread fingers and tea served in Royal Doulton, the author learns the full sordid horror from informants called Moneypenny, Skyfall, Thumper, Bambi and M.
The collective impression of The Plot – Ms Dorries’s account of Johnson’s fall – is illogical, lacking in motive and overheated, like a dream recollected on waking. One trouble with it is that, as Boris Johnson is quoted as saying of Partygate: “Trying to verify anything – other than the most obvious facts – is almost impossible.”
The book, at 350 pages, is not an easy read if you like a clear narrative. It is told as the quest for an explanation for the Plot. But the loose ends pile up. Pity the much-loved aunt who receives it for Christmas.
The Plot purports to bring sense to apparently deranged chaos. I pondered the 10,000 words of its serialisation then plunged into the rest. It was like wading through shredded paper. I might yet find a gem overlooked by turning over two pages at once, but I have no lively expectations.
There is no doubt Nadine Dorries was fond of Boris Johnson. She picked up his emotional responses to events. He said of Partygate: “It was utterly mad. It was kind of like Salem.” On leaving Parliament this year he declared: “I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt under way, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result.”
Ms Dorries was already inclined to see political danger in terms of witch hunts. That is how she characterised this newspaper’s investigation of MPs’ expenses. “What the Telegraph are executing is almost a McCarthyite witch hunt,” she told the BBC’s Today programme in 2009.
She now attributes to a book by Ferdinand Mount her understanding of “the principles of democracy”. But you can hardly blame him for her parliamentary absence on I’m a Celebrity..., which earned her a suspension of the whip, or the length of her withdrawal – like a living charade of Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” – after announcing her departure as an MP on learning her life peerage had been blocked by “sinister forces”.
The political analysis in The Plot has more puppetry than Tracy Island. Oliver Dowden (whom Nadine Dorries succeeded as Culture Secretary) is a “puppet” of Mr Smith. Lee Cain (the Downing Street director of communications) was “a total puppet” of Mr Cummings. Rishi Sunak was “their dream puppet”. But a question occurred to her about Michael Gove and the conspirators: “Is he their puppet or a puppeteer?”
By way of variation, Michael Gove became “a lackey of Cameron” and a “puppy dog” to Mr Cummings, even though Mr Gove “binds all the dark-arts people together”.
But the clincher comes in a conversation between Boris Johnson and “Nads”, as he calls her, after the Coronation. “I can see it now. The plot was always to get Rishi in,” he tells her. “It’s like this Manchurian candidate, their stooge.” Not understanding, she looked it up later and found Manchurian candidate means “a politician being used as a puppet by an enemy power”.
Behind it all, Dr No has been involved in the Movement for 40 years. He is the key player in Central Office and No 10, though very few people have ever met him. Yet, question his payment by the party, and the phone rings and it is Michael Gove, who robustly makes it clear that Dr No will remain on the CCHQ payroll. For he deals in the dark arts.
One contact told Ms Dorries: “I think Rishi was turned by these people playing with his mind.” So he wasn’t persuaded or used as an unwitting puppet; it was as though there were some mechanism of brain-influencing.
What The Plot reminded me of was a minor classic in medicine: Illustrations of Madness by John Haslam, published in 1810. It includes a memorable cast of characters who operate from a hideout in London Wall. The Middle Man operates an Air Loom, a machine that affects the thoughts of the victim by means unknown to science, such as “spermatic-animal-seminal rays”.
Fellow plotters include the Glove Woman (she has never been known to speak) and Sir Archy (whom some of the gang assert is a woman dressed in men’s apparel). Their “Dr No” is Bill or the King, who “exerts the most unrelenting and murderous villany; and he has never been observed to smile”.
Haslam meant to show that the patient who discovered this conspiratorial plot was mad. Nadine Dorries means to show that Boris Johnson was deposed by plotters who had raised up and brought down his predecessors.
But apply Ockham’s razor and the explanation is simpler and saner. For the nagging objection that remains in the reader’s mind is that any prime minister is surrounded by rivals who might supplant him. His fall is no conspiracy if his own errors and shortcomings turn him into a liability.
The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson is published by HarperCollins at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books