Nadine Dorries’s last book, The Plot, was about the ousting of Boris Johnson less than three years after the landslide that saw him become prime minister, and in it she made various strange allegations, chief among them the fact that his fall was primarily the work of a secretive cabal of Tory fixers. Known as “the Movement”, its members include Johnson’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, the ex-MP Michael Gove, and a shadowy Conservative prime ministerial aide called Dougie Smith, of whom only one photograph exists and about whom details are scarce. Why did these men commit this act of what she calls regicide? Was it because Johnson was a liability? No, and you should put all those lockdown parties from your mind. According to Dorries, they were working, for reasons that remain foggy, at the behest of a mysterious character she referred to only as Dr No, after the Bond villain.
Dorries’s new book is styled as a sequel to The Plot, and thus promises quite a lot to anyone who was even vaguely interested in the above. “I have to finish the story!” she writes, as she prepares once again to Zoom with some excitable Westminster snouts (this time, her subject is the disastrous occupation of Number 10 by Rishi Sunak). Will Nadine track Dr No to his private island, and attempt to do something awful to him using a drug-laced cigarette and a tarantula? Or will she just tell us his real name at last?
And what of Dougie Smith? Will she clandestinely photograph this terrifying beast (otherwise known as the Wolf) and send a clear shot of his visage to the Daily Mail’s picture desk? At this point, after all, Smith isn’t only responsible for Johnson’s political expiration; according to Dorries, he’s also the co-creator, with Gove, and possibly the Mossad, of Kemi Badenoch, a woman whose “secrets” he knows and will likely deploy at some moment in the perma-chaos of the future.
But, alas, the promise comes to naught. In Downfall, Dr No appears to have been usurped in the baddie stakes by the likes of Alicia Kearns, the MP for Rutland and Stanford (her principal crime is ambition), and the “Gollum-like” William Wragg, the former MP for Hazel Grove (more of him later). And while her contacts tell her that the great achievement of The Plot was to convince Tory MPs of the existence of Smith – before this, it seems, he was like Big Foot, Nessie or the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, and spotted only late at night in the bars of the House of Commons – in her new book, we’re no closer to grasping his motivations, let alone who his true paymaster might be. All she can tell us is that Smith, a “shuffling”, gout-stricken figure, uses a “grid of shit” to spread “bad juju” wherever he goes.
Dorries, a former nurse, tells us repeatedly that she is a woman of the world. But researching Downfall was a grubby business, parliament a hotbed of decadence. Even she’s shocked when she checks her phone and finds, courtesy of two helpful Westminster insiders, “a screenshot photograph no amount of mind bleach will ever expunge from my brain”. No, it’s not an image of Sunak using highlighter pens (the mark, for her, of a hopeless political case). It is a picture of an MP in his office at Portcullis House, “proudly holding a large erection in his hand”. To whom might it belong, this large erection? Dorries doesn’t say. Her eye is drawn to another large erection in the form of the London Eye, “revolving happily” behind him. How she hopes its passengers can’t see what’s going on across the river.
The photo is not a one-off. More follow. One man, she notes, has briefs that are “very full”, which is a whole new twist on the concept of red boxes. There’s also talk of scandalous allegations involving Wragg, the MP who was at the centre of the Grindr honeytrap scandal earlier this year (though, oddly, this is not half so suspicious-making in her eyes as the fact that his home had a landline). How does all this connect to her wider theories and the so-called Movement? It has, I think, something to do with the Chris Pincher scandal, which also played a part in Johnson’s downfall (in 2022, Pincher, the then deputy chief whip, groped a man; Johnson later admitted he knew of allegations against him before appointing him). But after reading several pages devoted to Pincher’s victim – or “victim”, as Dorries likes to have it – I’m not sure I’m any the wiser.
On and on the book goes, like some half-crazed filibustering MP in the dead of night. Dorries has written a number of novels – I call them “novels” – but nonfiction seems to be beyond her. Downfall comprises little more than a series of unedited interviews with her “sources”, occasionally punctuated with some scene-setting in which she orders coffee or a slimline tonic (assignations take place in restaurants that she first checks out, like a spy).
She is, she tells us, highly diligent; nothing gets past her, for all that, as she puts it, “even Caligula and his horse would struggle” to understand the story she has to tell (not a high bar, admittedly). But in the end, the result is rather boring for the reader. Where, oh where, is Dougie? If the man does indeed exist, not even Westminster’s platinum blonde Carl Bernstein can find him. For the time being, his “grid” – whatever it’s made of – remains the stuff of legend.
• Downfall: The Self-Destruction of the Conservative Party by Nadine Dorries is published by HarperCollins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
