Review: Dorries and the Plot against Reality

Nadine Dorries' book – a fan fiction for her beloved Boris Johnson blended with some dull WhatsApp chats and half-remembered Bond scripts – manages to make a shadowy conspiracy boring...

Previously: Cracking up with the Egg Man
The Evening Standard's 'Free Speech' campaign is a yolk... I mean joke.

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Imagine State of Play described to you by someone on strong painkillers or watching a remake of The Manchurian Candidate scripted by a group of distracted toddlers. Either of those options would be better than Nadine Dorries’ theoretically non-fiction title The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson.

You may have thought that the only ‘plot’ against Boris Johnson was a years-long conspiracy between his libido, his greed, and his inclination to lie so thoroughly and frequently that he could wholeheartedly believe those deceptions. But no! Nadine ‘Hetty Brainrot Investigates’ Dorries has revealed a complex (and migraine-inducingly confusing) conspiracy at the rotten heart of the Conservative Party, organised and enabled by — cue the dramatic musical sting — THE MOVEMENT.

Dorries, or rather her source ‘Moneypenny’ (the anonymous and not-at-all fictional people she interviews are all given names taken from Bond films), explains:

… the Federation of Conservative Students, which was shut down for being too right-wing… reconvened into a group who gave themselves the informal moniker, ‘the movement”. Not that they call themselves that today… 

Later in the book, former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, who employed Dominic Cummings as his director of strategy, says:

 … these guys, “the movement” as they called themselves back then, they were very certain that [the 2001 election] meant we had to burn the party down. All young men, all still high on student political life… [they] told me what it was I had to do, like they would know, and what I had to do was to manage the decline of the party into defeat. 

The existence of “the movement” is detailed in Dorries’ typical hyperventilating style and she delights in naming members. The problem is the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) wasn’t really a secret — it was killed off in 1986 by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing even for him — and it’s not a huge surprise that people who were part of it as politically engaged and connected students are now MPs, advisors, and in other positions around the party, think-tanks, pollsters and papers.

Douglas ‘Dougie’ Smith, a No.10 advisor with a nebulously defined role under David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, was a prominent figure in the FCS. Here he is in a Guardian report from 1985:

The annual conference of the Federation of Conservative Students yesterday voted by an overwhelming majority amid scenes of near chaos to remove the former Conservative prime minister, Mr Edward Heath, as life patron. The motion’s backers, led by Mr Douglas Smith of the far-right libertarian faction, claimed that Mr Heath was no longer a “suitable person” to hold the office.

His background and that of his wife Munira Murza, another advisor to Boris Johnson during in Number 10, has been extensively covered by such underground samizdat publications as… The Daily Telegraph. It wrote, in September 2021, that:

… Munira Mirza and Dougie Smith make a curious couple.

One is the straight-laced, brainiac daughter of British-Pakistani parents who found her first political home in communism. The other is a Right-wing university dropout who plays poker with millionaires and ran ‘five-star’ sex parties for swingers.

Yet the two are devoted to each other and, after Boris and Carrie Johnson, they also happen to be the most powerful husband and wife in British politics.

If you’ve never heard of them (and you certainly won’t be alone) that’s because, unlike the Johnsons, they have never sought fame or public recognition, and actively try to avoid it. But you can guarantee that Mirza and Smith have affected how you are living your life right now.

Mirza, Boris Johnson’s policy chief and, some would say, his political muse, co-wrote the Conservative Party manifesto that delivered a landslide win for Johnson (also killing the Corbynite dream of a socialist Britain) and shapes the Government decisions that dictate everything from your liberties to your taxes.

Smith’s precise job is a mystery even to Cabinet ministers, but if you have a Tory MP, the chances are that the Scotsman will have had a say in putting them there, and when they make a mistake – such as being exposed in The Daily Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses investigation – it is Smith who will be called in to save their skin.

Is the influence of political advisors like Mirza and Smith excessive? Yes. Are there too many incestuous, nepotistic, and self-serving connections in Westminster, stretching between parties, the media, and the think tank industrial complex? Is Smith an unpleasant person whose utterly disgusting behaviour goes all the way back to his days as a pathetic student? Yes and yes.

But does this constitute a conspiracy of the kind that Ian Fleming would have woven into one of his novels? No. If ‘the movement’ were as influential or effective as Dorries suggests, there’s absolutely no way she would have heard of them. What’s even more incredible is that Dorries has managed to make a book that claims to reveal a secret organisation at the heart of government so boring.

While The Plot was announced in November 2022, had Dorries been awarded the peerage she had been promised by her beloved ‘Boris’, it would not exist in this form.

Though she famously (and accurately) called David Cameron and George Osborne “two posh boys who don't know the price of milk,” Dorries is an unabashed fan girl of Johnson, another Old Etonian with a cartoonish disconnect from the lives of ‘real’ people (whoever they are). She adores ‘the establishment’ and being part of it — the book is full of references to her ministerial staff and government car — as long as it keeps her close.

The Plot is a 340-page tantrum and I would not be delighted by it if I were Johnson; while Dorries fawns over both the former Prime Minister and his wife Carrie (“a total trooper, [she] floated around looking like a supermodel…”), in her attempt to make her conspiracy theory stand up, she makes him sound like a very dim bulb.

‘Moneypenny’ — who Dorries claims was a senior and well-placed aide in Downing Street — claims Johnson had no idea what was going on. Dorries writes:

‘To your knowledge, how much of this did the Prime Minister know?’ I asked her. 

She sighed. ‘None of it. Boris was like someone charging forward the minute he got through the door; it’s the big picture for him, always. The energy. He wanted to get things done and he was obsessed with delivering on his manifesto promises; he’s a bit old-fashioned like that. He thinks if the people vote for something, your job is to deliver it because that is what they will judge you on at the ballot box when you go back and ask them to vote again.’ 

The Johnson character in The Plot is a man who has been in and around the Conservative Party for years but has the instincts of a bumbling P.G. Wodehouse character totally unaware of the schemes being run by any number of malevolent Jeeves-like figures circling him. It’s hard to square with the real-world Johnson who was caught on tape supplying his friend Darius Guppy with a journalist’s address so he could beat him up or recorded raging at a woman with whom he’d had an affair and then attempted to set up with a job in City Hall.

All of Dorries’ ‘sources’ — she unconvincingly claims to have talked to “well over fifty people” — talk in exactly the same way, almost as if the author of a series of rickety romance novels was writing their dialogue. And all of those ‘sources’ try to persuade the reader of the same vision: Boris Johnson as responsible man of the people just trying to do the best job possible in a thoroughly decent and “a bit old-fashioned” way.

Similarly, Dorries tries to paint herself as a woman of destiny, forced to write this book by so many friends, allies, and colleagues begging her to break the silence about ‘the movement’ — the Tory SPECTRE with multiple Blofelds and blowhards. She writes, so breathlessly that she must have had to grab an inhaler mid-paragraph:

‘Are you going to write your political book soon?’ I had always laughed and replied with the same line, ‘No, because I write books about characters people are actually interested in’. I have read enough political books to know how it works. MPs and aides love to insert themselves into the footnotes of history and so the stories they repeat to journalists amazingly always have the version where they play a key and decisive role.   

It’s one of the few paragraphs in the book where I feel Dorries accidentally tells the truth; she’s still trying to write “characters people are actually interested in”. Besides the handful of people who are explicitly named — notably Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith — the anonymous sources present as a series of hand-puppets at a Punch & Judy stall operated by Dorries alone, despite her claim in interviews that each and every page is splattered with evidence.

Iain Duncan Smith being ousted as Tory leader because he was shit becomes, in the alternate reality of DorriesWorld, the starting gun for ‘the movement’ controlling the leadership of the Tory Party with an iron fist (and presumably red trousers). Cameron stepping down after the Brexit referendum? Another coup for ‘the movement’ rather than a Prime Minister who torpedoed his election win and majority with a referendum promised only to staunch the loss of voters to UKIP. Theresa May? Destroyed not by her own inability to navigate the Brexit debates but by… Michael Gove, one of most machiavellian members of ‘the movement’. And Boris Johnson? Brought down not by lies, u-turns, policy chaos, and corruption that even the Tory Party wouldn’t tolerate but as yet another move in a game played by ‘the movement’ in which, Dorries relates portentously, there is “no endgame”.

Curiously, The Daily Mail — for whom Dorries is a columnist — and Rupert Murdoch — on whose slow tabloid fart of a channel Talk TV she hosts a show barely appear in The Plot. Simon Walters, a former Daily Mail political editor who parted company with the company in late 2022, comes in for a shoeing and accounts for all four mentions of the paper. Murdoch turns up only to be showered with slobbering praise when Dorries talks to one of her anonymous ‘sources’ — allegedly a close friend of Johnson’s — about Sunak’s partygate fine:

[Sunak decided] to blow it all up and writes out his resignation letter. Boris says to him, “What are you talking about? It’s a fixed-penalty notice.” It then turns out, Rishi’s being counselled by a senior hedge fund manager called Mas, and Mas and Rishi were best friends from their days at a hedge fund they worked on together… Now Mas is a board director at NewsCorp — [Masroor] Siddiqui is his name — and Rishi is Prime Minister and probably a billionaire without ever having won a single vote. 

So, Mas is coaching and counselling Rishi, and I'm not being funny, but Mas knows less about the UK political scene than the Polish waiter who just brought our drinks here – and I'm not being disparaging to the waiter – and then it becomes necessary once we learn this to ask Rupert Murdoch to speak to Mas and tell him to cease and desist from counselling Rishi to resign over an eighty-quid fine. I mean, what the fuck? Rupert, who does understand British politics and is an incredibly intelligent man, got it straightaway; he was on the side of the angels here. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? I don't believe that Rupert knew Rishi was being counselled by Mas, until he was alerted to the fact.  

The same ‘source’ provides the second and last reference to Murdoch:

Look at Rupert Murdoch and the mistakes he has made, the marriages, all of it, but look at how he makes business decisions; there is a man who is ruthless because he has to be. That is what Boris needs to learn, not to get nicer but to get better at decision-making, and I think he’s there now. He will bounce back, and next time he will be surrounded by people who will do a better job protecting him… 

Dorries is absolutely fine with Murdoch — a US citizen — interfering with UK politics because he pays her. That same applies to that other self-serving press baron, Lord Rothermere, who doesn’t appear in the book at all. In the scheme sketched out by Nadine, its minor political advisors and grim little political operators who have the true power, MPs are pawns, and the media are largely observers and not catalysts.

Another notable mention in the book is the single name check for the perpetually thirsty drink-driving enthusiast Paul ‘Guido Fawkes’ Staines. Although he too was a member of the Federation of Conservative Students (“I never wore a Hang Mandela badge but I hung out with people who did…”), Dorries gives him an out: “… it would be wrong to suggest anyone tells Paul Staines what to do.”

It’s more emotionally satisfying and useful to her career for Dorries to talk about ‘Dr No’ — the man she paints as a rabbit-killing “shadowy fixer at the heart of No. 10” — and to glom together every figure on the right of British politics who hasn’t helped her in “the movement” than it is to address real corruption and the rotten heart of the party that made her Culture Secretary. Her issue is not that her party is bent but that she and ‘Boris’ no longer benefit from it.

This self-serving and hallucinatory cocktail of conspiracy theory laced with plausible revelations/allegations — some serious and criminal — would be a lot more bearable if it was competently or even entertainingly written. Dorries describes every cup of tea, glass of wine, and meal consumed with ‘sources’ and includes soporific details of the decor in the many private members’ clubs, bars, and parliamentary offices she visits during her one-woman quest for truth.

There are countless sentences so leaden that they suggest the copy-editors and proofreaders assigned to the project may have abandoned the book and opted to instead retreat to remote nunneries where they will never again have to encounter such cack-handed language and imagery. Here are three of my ‘favourites’

But on the occasional Tuesday mornings when [bacon sandwiches were served], even this ritual of Cabinet I could not let pass. 

Was it different in your day, Walpole? I would ask myself as I gazed up at his portrait.

… and this unintentional bit of time travelling:

‘You’re mad,’ my youngest had said as I caught the flying bread from the toaster and began to butter it ten minutes earlier. 

Then there are the moments of fangirlish praise for ‘Boris’ that may require more sensitive readers to strap on a big and have a sickbag handy:

Outside on the pavement, before I headed down Millbank towards Westminster, I took my phone out of the pocket of my trench coat and googled something Boris had just said: and bliss it was to be in that dawn alive … Surely, he was quoting someone or something. The answer came straight back: Wordsworth. Boris is the only person I have met in my life who has the ability to effortlessly insert a great poet into daily conversation, without missing a beat. 

While it would be good for a former Culture Secretary to recognise a famous line from Wordsworth, it’s the notion that Johnson’s ability to recite memorised lines is amazing that’s the real problem here; he’s no more awe-inspiring than a well-trained African Grey parrot with time on its claws.

Dorries is also greatly impressed by the amenities at 5 Hertford Street, the private members club where she seems to have written much of the book and which serves as the venue for many of her mysterious ‘source’ meetings. With 6 glowing mentions in the book, I suspect this product placement may have secured a reduction in the club’s usual £1,800 annual fee. Incidentally, the owner of 5 Hertford Street is Robin Birley, the half-brother of Johnson loyalist and close personal friend of Carrie Johnson, Zach Goldsmith.

The Plot has more puppets than a busy week on The Muppet Show. Oliver Dowden — the current Deputy PM and a man with the air of a head prefect who frequently gets bogwashed by smaller boys than him — was Dorries’ predecessor as Culture Secretay; he’s a “puppet” of Dougie Smith according to her. Lee Cain — who once dressed as a chicken for work at the Mirror thereby preparing him for a future with someone else’s hand up his arse — is described as “a total puppet” of Cummings. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak — who is the size of one of Ken Dodd’s Diddymen — is given the honour of being not just a puppet but “their dream puppet”.

Michael Gove, however, could be either master or marionette: “Is he their puppet or a puppeteer?” asks Dorries like a slow child watching the antics of Mr Punch. The book also claims Gove was “a lackey of Cameron” and a “puppy dog” for Cummings while being the person who “binds all the dark-arts people together”. He’s clearly busier than we had already suspected. God knows how he gets all that energy for dancing…

Dorries, who is definitely not a puppet for Boris Johnson, quotes him coming to a conveniently headline-provoking conclusion about his former Chancellor:

I can see it now. I just couldn’t see it at the time. The plot was always to get Rishi in. It’s like this Manchurian candidate, their stooge. 

Not having seen the film or even heard of it, Dorries laughs along anyway (“We both laughed. I didn’t actually know what I was laughing at…”) and looks it up later:

At the end of the drive, I looked up the meaning of Manchurian candidate: “A person, especially a politician, being used as a puppet by an enemy power.” I slip the car into gear as I remember his words from one of the many conversations we had, one sentence that comes back to haunt me over and over: 

“I rather naively thought that in this country power flowed from the people into Westminster when electing a prime minister.” 

It seems we were all wrong. 

The entire book is a “you’ve nearly got it…” moment happening again and again in a frustrating Groundhog Day style (look it up, Nadine). Where Dorries has to construct an idiot’s idea of a conspiracy, there is instead a collection of mundane realities — the political culture of the UK is corrupt, compromised, and constructed to serve a very small collection of people. And Boris Johnson is one of them. But Dorries, like any fan for whom the origins of that word apply — fanatic — can’t possibly recognise that. It cannot be her hero who shares much of the blame; it must be ‘the cabal’.

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Outside of the contents of the book, The Plot is an interesting product and source of future content for the media. It’s published by HarperCollins, a News Corp company. Dorries is contracted to present shows for TalkTV, which is owned by News UK, a News Corp subsidiary; she publicised her book on her programme as well as the channel’s breakfast show. TalkTV and TalkRadio praise Dorries and give her lots of air-time while The Times and its continuity broadcast wing, Times Radio, mock the book with its reviewers and presenters oddly neglecting to mention that it only exists because of their employer.

In an excellent review in The Times, Patrick Maguire writes…

The problems with Nadine Dorries’s very long and very strange book on the fall of Boris Johnson begin on the title page. It’s called The Plot. Plot is a word with multiple meanings. In this case it is used to suggest a malign, shadowy conspiracy. But a plot is also a sequence of events presented by a writer to a reader. It’s a prerequisite for writing a story that people might understand. I picked up this book in the admittedly naive hope that the title might imply the existence of at least one of these two kinds of plots. I put it down having discerned neither. This really is the single weirdest book I have ever read, and anyone who does not reach the same conclusion after reading it should be sectioned. 

… while in the comment section, Deborah Ross chuckles:

Dorries, who is possibly our most famous non-dame, has, at last, identified this “shadowy cabal”. The main players are Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings and Dougie Smith, so it may not be that shadowy, but there are others unnamed, who are now thought to include a hedgehog, a potato and Noddy. You won’t find any of them signing in or out of No 10 for obvious reasons. Shadowy-ness. Noddy was once photographed entering by the back door — google it — but his people have refused to comment. (“No comment,” Big Ears said.) The hedgehog is elusive, even when you leave out a saucer of milk. The potato has now gone to ground but is still on the payroll. I don’t know how the potato feels about not doing the job it’s paid for. Perfectly fine, probably. It’s only gone on the record once, after attending the Bafta awards in 2019 and being photographed with Benedict Cumberbatch. “Not bad for a working-class potato from Liverpool,” it said. I’ve since been told, on the quiet, that it says that all the time.

It’s as though the Times side of News UK thinks its audience is unaware of what the TalkTV side is up to and vice versa. It’s curious. If I didn’t know better, I’d say those bastards in ‘The Movement’ had something to do with it. Definitely not cuddly old Rupert and his lovely son Lachlan anyway…

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