Nadine Dorries’ book is a mess of conspiracy theories – and a surprising truth

I’ve read it so you don’t have to – all 336 pages of The Plot, Nadine Dorries’ strange book about rabbit-slaying, orgies, vendettas and political assassinations.

You’ll have seen, if you’re a Daily Mail reader, some of the more eye-popping bits. The MP having sex with a prostitute on a billiard table while four MPs stand cheering him on. The No 10 aide – codename “Dr No” – who chopped a pet rabbit in four and nailed it to an ex-girlfriend’s door after she ditched him.

But is any of it true?

When Nads was contemplating abandoning her political career to write this book, she had a flicker of self-doubt: “I’m not [Sunday Times journalist] Tim Shipman,” she writes. “It will be hopeless. I like to write historical and romantic novels.”

The blunt verdict is that this attempt at non-fiction is not entirely hopeless: it certainly reinforces other accounts of a dysfunctional governing class in this country. But nor is it clear how much of it is believable. The story about the billiard-table sex, for example, is attributed to an elderly Tory, codenamed “Thumper”, whom Nads meets in an old vicarage somewhere up the M1. Does Thumper have any clue what he’s talking about? Your guess is as good as Nads’.

And the butchered pet? The source for this doesn’t even have a codename. The story is prefaced by the words “They say...”. It’s a rumour.

“They” feature quite large in this book, which purports to reveal the “true” story of the political assassination of Boris Johnson. “They” are a shadowy crowd – let’s call them the “Deep State”, even if Nads doesn’t. That’s what the QAnon people bang on about.

“They” fester deep in the heart of the Conservative Party and/or No 10. They conspire on a shadowy WhatsApp group called “Order of the Phoenix”. They are a poison; a cancer at the heart of government.

Sometimes “they” include, or overlap with, a sinister-sounding group called the Movement. Some of its members have names – they are said to include the Times columnist Danny Finkelstein (“entirely invented”, he says), Michael Gove, former spin doctor Robbie Gibb, No 10 aide Dougie Smith, and Dominic Cummings. And, of course, the alleged rabbit-slayer, Dr No.

“They are like a spider’s web, strong,” gushes Nads. “They have people behind desks in No 10. People alongside secretaries of state in departments. People in the media, people on yachts. They mix with the money men of the globe.” All very John Buchan.

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Between them, the Movement and their friends are said to have clinically removed five Tory MPs or leaders. They are coup-meisters. Before the polls had even closed in 2019, they had decided that Johnson would have to go. Michael Howard was merely a caretaker. Iain Duncan Smith was quietly executed. Liz Truss never stood a chance. Rishi will be lucky to survive. And so on.

You may think that each of these figures was deeply flawed, and that each, in their own way, cocked up so badly that they would have had to walk without much assistance from the Movement. But you would be wrong.

Nads – the nickname is Johnson’s – is delightfully frank about her research methods. She takes up more or less permanent residence at 5 Hertford Street, a swanky Mayfair club where she meets her sources, and uses an AI app called Otter to record and transcribe what they tell her.

A conventional reporter, author or historian would take this raw material and begin to interrogate, contextualise and verify it. Not Nads. Her method is to regurgitate what her 50+ anonymous sources have told her. By the bucketload. We, the reader, are left to determine how much of it is true.

Only two sources go on the record: Duncan Smith and Johnson. Nads tries to construct a theory that both were brought down by the Movement. You, dear reader, will have to decide whether you think this is plausible.

There are many “bad” people in the book (the inverted commas are mine, for the benefit of m’learned friends). They include Gove, the baddest of bad; Oliver Dowden, Simon Case, Lee Cain, Cummings, the aforementioned Smith and Dr No.

The list of “good” people is rather shorter – and it is headed by Boris himself, who emerges as nice, trusting, loyal, honest and decent. Nads, the girl from Breck Road, Liverpool, is dazzled by Boris’s intelligence and learning.

More than once, she emerges from an audience with the great man to google a phrase he has used. On page 111, it is the words: “Bliss it was to be in that dawn alive”.

“Surely, he was quoting something,” wonders Nads. Google tells the former culture secretary it’s Wordsworth.

“Boris,” she bubbles, “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.”

A kinder book editor would have at least saved the quote from being mangled in the mouths of both Boris and Nads.

So – part Westminster gossip, part QAnon Lite. Which is not to say that large parts of the book do not have what the former Private Eye editor, Richard Ingrams, liked to call the “ring of truth”.

We know from the reams of evidence emerging from the Covid inquiry that Johnson’s No 10 was, indeed, a dysfunctional snake pit of toxic feuds, incontinent media briefing and lousy governance. Nads’ anonymous sources certainly reinforce that picture. And I even spotted a genuine news story – if true – about an alleged attempt by shadowy forces to fix who got to chair the supposedly independent media regulator, Ofcom.

Towards the end of the book, the elderly Thumper tells Nads: “One of the things I’ve learned about the Conservative Party over the long years is the importance of sex. I know this sounds a bit odd, and please forgive me, but everyone sleeps with everyone.”

Good material, maybe, for Nads’ next romantic novel. She was right: she’s no Tim Shipman.

Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, is editor of Prospect magazine