The awful truth

The worst books I had ever read until The Plot were Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, a fount of baseless conspiracy theories, and the footballer’s memoir Ashley Cole: My Defence, memorable for its utter lack of self-awareness. The Plot shares the worst aspects of both. It’s also full of casual factual errors and appears to have been written by someone for whom English is a foreign language. But I have done my best to learn something from it.

Its author, Nadine Dorries, fuelled only by ambition, unhindered by an apparent lack of talent, somehow rose from a working-class Liverpool background to a career as a Tory politician that culminated in her becoming Boris Johnson’s secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport. Inexplicably, she is also a bestselling novelist who claims sales of nearly three million copies.

Johnson is the hero of the book. Dorries reveals him to be a saintlike Buddah-esque workaholic whose only desire is to deliver policies for the people. The villains are a group around Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings and the Conservative apparatchik-cum-BBC powerbroker Robbie Gibb, who are plotting to oust Johnson as prime minister. But these people are merely frontmen. Their controller is a dastardly figure known as “Dr No”, who has mysteriously left no trace on the internet despite pretty much running No 10 for decades. No photograph of Dr No exists. He may be with Mossad.

The intrepid Dorries has unearthed a few nuggets about him: Dr No”was once on remand in prison for alleged arson. When a girlfriend ended their relationship, it is rumoured that he had her little brother’s pet rabbit chopped into four and nailed to the front door of the family home to greet him when he got home from school.” Dr No also attends the sex parties that are at the heart of the modern Conservative Party, although, Dorries says, he only watches.

The voters revere Johnson, and have no idea of the plot against him, because “the media” keep it secret. Dorries knows what will happen if she reveals the plot: “They would call me mad, say the book was a work of fiction, a conspiracy.” Worse: she might be killed. One interviewee warns her: “Just be careful. I mean, this has been their life, their addiction, for nearly 40 years and you are about to… well, you know what you are doing. Just be careful.”

The book’s structure, insofar as it has one, is an endless sequence of Dorries interviewing unnamed insiders who reveal the plot. Each interviewee’s identity is kept secret, and each one sounds strangely like the previous interviewee, and also like Dorries. Occasionally, Dorries brings her discoveries to Johnson, who nods sadly and sagely.

She invalidates her own claim to be revealing an unknown plot right at the end of the book, when she quotes Cummings revealing it himself, in a BBC TV interview. He told Laura Kuenssberg that within days of the Tories’ election victory in 2019, he and others from the Vote Leave campaign began plotting to oust Johnson. Cummings explains: “We only got him in there because we had to solve a certain problem, not because he was the right person to be running the country.” (Dorries, characteristically, transcribes his quote incorrectly.)

She says his comments went “astonishingly … unremarked”. In fact, a Google search for his quote throws up dozens of news articles. The dastardly “plot” didn’t work until Partygate discredited Johnson. (Dorries explains that Partygate was a plot, too: the only parties were secret ones on Fridays in the Downing Street press office, and Johnson knew nothing about them because he was always away on Fridays.)

HarperCollins presumably had its reasons for publishing The Plot. The Murdoch-owned house habitually buys memoirs by British and American conservative politicians, including Johnson’s own forthcoming prime ministerial memoir. But any publishing professional who worked on Dorries’ apparently unedited book is complicit in the debasing of the culture. No human experience is entirely valueless, however, and I learned two things from reading The Plot.

The first is a Dorries allegation that might, bizarrely, be accurate. She writes that Gibb, as a BBC board member, tried unsuccessfully to get the Tory operative Lord (Stephen) Gilbert installed as chair of Ofcom – the communications regulator that regulates the BBC. Deadline.com , a news site about the entertainment industry, quotes confirmation from an unnamed former colleague of Dorries from her time as culture secretary. Gibb has not denied the story. Neither did the BBC’s acting chair Elan Closs Stephens, though she said the board’s code of practice hadn’t been breached.

Otherwise, the book has value as an anthropological document reflecting Tory political culture of the 2020s. In Dorries’ world, the UK is a one-party state in which Labour barely exists, policy doesn’t matter, politics consists of plots within the ruling party, and a fool can become secretary of state if loyal enough. The terribleness of this book tells its own story about British politics.