Former culture secretary Nadine Dorries has put forward several lurid claims and elaborate conspiracies about those at the top of government in her new book The Plot: the Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, which is published on 9 November. They are based largely on anonymous sources, as well as her own hunches and observations and some on-the-record interviews including with Johnson himself. Here are the main claims.
Boris Johnson believes the Conservatives are ‘drifting to defeat’
The former PM tells Dorries: “People still feel hacked off. They voted for change in 2019 and they are drifting back to Labour in those Brexit seats because they’re not seeing a changed government. Nothing to rally behind, nothing; we are just drifting into defeat …
“The whole thing needs a massive kick in the pants … unless we grip it, the results of the local elections will be repeated at a general election, and Starmer will be a complete disaster … I feel a massive, massive sense of frustration that we had an eighty-seat majority. We had a fantastic agenda. We could have kept the whole thing going.”
‘Where is the vision?’: Johnson laments the ditching of his programme
Johnson is quoted saying: “We just aren’t doing enough to fix our energy supply problems, we aren’t doing enough to build nuclear reactors. HS2 has become a total joke. Levelling up has been all but forgotten. What’s happening to gigabit broadband? I don’t hear and don’t know what’s happening to all the infrastructure stuff. We hear nothing on skills. The whole social care reform has been junked and so much work went into that. Leave Brexit to one side, there was a massive agenda we had as a government to transform the country, and it doesn’t seem to be happening in any form of articulated way. I’m particularly concerned that there’s no grand economic strategy for growth. Why? Where is the vision for the country?”
‘I’m a coiled mamba’ Johnson wants to slash corporation tax
Johnson told Dorries: “If you can have a post-Brexit Britain, why the hell are we putting up corporation tax in this way? Why not cut corporation tax to 10%? You know, why don’t we just do what the Irish do? Why not just outbid the Irish? We don’t have to obey international norms on corporation tax …
“I’m frustrated. I’m seething. I’m a caged beast. I’m a coiled mamba … We’re drifting; we are losing the plot.”
Rape allegations against a Tory MP covered up by the party
Citing a Conservative colleague Dorries said a woman alleged that she had been raped by an MP, but “no action was taken by the party”.
Dorries’ source said: “An MP gave a young female a date rape drug; the next thing she knew was she woke in a country hotel the following morning. He wanted her out of the room because, he told her, he had visitors coming for breakfast.”
Another source said: “It was later discovered that someone in the party secretly sent out regular cheques to the Priory Clinic to pay for the treatment of one of this man’s later victims, and still nobody spoke out … If action had been taken when that first rape was reported, those other women would have been saved from their life trauma.”
A shadowy cabal, Dorries calls ‘the movement’, has been pulling strings in the Conservative party for years
Dorries names the key members of the movement as long-serving cabinet member Michael Gove, former adviser Dominic Cummings, and Dougie Smith, a seasoned insider and husband of Johnson’s former policy chief Munira Mirza.
Quoting a source she says: “When Munira did her big resignation thing over Boris throwing the Jimmy Savile criticism at Starmer for never having prosecuted him when he was the Director of Public Prosecutions, it was so obviously the ‘time to kill Boris’ trigger. When you know how they operate, you can sniff out what was behind it and how it was staged.”
Sunak said to rely on the advice of a rumoured rabbit killer, Dorries calls Dr No
Dorries says another member of the movement is “a very frightening individual I have codenamed Dr No”.
She writes: “He is paid by Central Office, has a pass to No 10 and, some say, Rishi Sunak doesn’t move without first seeking his advice. And yet people can spend years working in No 10 and never hear his name mentioned.
“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, in true Mafia style.”
Michael Gove frequently plotted against Johnson and is now grooming Kemi Badenoch for Tory leader
Dorries quotes a source saying: “He [Gove] has been a big part of the plan to nuke Boris forever, and here he was in no way benefiting from all of his plotting and meddling. He’s also been building up Kemi Badenoch as the next leader of the Conservative Party, because that was part of the plan and it still is. He’s been mentoring Kemi for a long time, possibly, originally, at Dougie’s behest.”
Dorries writes she told Johnson “You know all roads lead to Gove, don’t you?’ I said to Boris, not for the first time. ‘Cummings is Gove, Gove is Cummings. Smith is Gove and Gove is Smith. Dr No, he is everywhere and everyone. Whenever any of them are exposed, it’s Gove who dives straight in to protect them. He fights for them all.’
Boris turned to the window and clasped his fingers together on the desk. He thought for what felt like an age. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘I think you’re right. There were people telling me, I should have sacked Gove long ago. He wasn’t delivering; he was insubordinate.”
Rishi Sunak also plotted against Johnson, Dorries and her sources allege
Dorries quotes someone whom Boris was said to trust implicitly, who said of Sunak: “He just wouldn’t play ball on anything. So it’s bloody obvious, his plotting, led by Rishi and his Chief of Staff, Liam Booth-Smith, it was hiding in plain sight. And then we find out that Rishi had asked his ministers in the Treasury to back him in a leadership election, back in February, five months earlier. Rishi’s duplicity was the unspoken elephant in the room.”
The same source claimed Johnson and Sunak had dinner together the night before Sunak resigned in July 2022. The source said: “Of course the next day Rishi blindsided Boris and resigned. Yeah, genuinely, even for a cut-throat world that was very shitty behaviour.”
Dorries claims Rishi resigned a day earlier than his actual resignation statement, and coordinated with Sajid Javid. “Rishi had already vacated his position as Chancellor the day before; he just hadn’t told anyone yet other than his own confidants,” she wrote.
‘Sunak lacklustre’
Dorries writes: “I had seen enough of his behaviour at first hand to know he didn’t possess the essential personality to put him into the Thatcher, Blair, Boris camp. He was firmly in the category of Major, May and Brown.
She says she followed him at a speaking event: “His oratory was lacklustre, he had no presence, and frankly, his speech was hesitant, squeaky and disappointing.”
Dowden: ‘so little talent’
Dorries writes: “Oliver Dowden was invariably the first [to try to speak at Cabinet]. I have never heard anyone talk for so long and say so little. Oliver used a hundred words when ten would do, and when he finished speaking I wasn’t the only one left inwardly groaning and wondering at the greatest mystery of the Cabinet: how a man of so little discernible talent had risen so far.
Hancock’s security cameras were tampered with before CCTV footage emerged of him kissing an aide
Dorries, a health minister under Hancock, writes: “Matt was caught kissing Gina [Coladangelo], the security camera was facing Matt’s inner office and inner door when other cameras were turned away from the offices and out to the roof balconies. The inquiry found that the camera had been facing the door because of access to the roof, only the door it was facing didn’t have access to the roof … The camera had been tampered with.”
Johnson was bullied into keeping Cummings after Barnard Castle incident
A source told Dorries: “He nearly did sack him. Remember Barnard Castle, there were three people allowed into the room with Boris when all of that kicked off. They were Dougie Smith, Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, with Dr No on speaker phone, and all of them reinforced the narrative that Cummings had to stay, that Boris could not allow the mob and MPs (God, how they hated MPs) to dictate via social media and pressure via the whips the decisions to be taken by the Prime Minister. I mean, it was intense. I’d say Boris was bullied into keeping him.”
Johnson says Cummings was a nihilist he should have sacked sooner
Boris told Dorries: “We should have moved on from him much, much earlier… We needed a strong team and Vote Leave had been a winning team. It was always a bit odd though how Lee Cain and many of the people working in No. 10 always referred to Cummings as ‘the Dark Lord’. I could never get my head around that one. Quite odd.
“Lots of people said I was mad to take him on … The country had become bogged down because of the failure to get Brexit done and I was going to need a mailed fist to help to get things done.
“But he just wasn’t that man. He was very good at nihilism and breaking things down but not so great at building or repairing things, or at delivering on instructions. We didn’t make enough progress on anything. He didn’t make things happen; he wasn’t doing his job.”
The Plot by Nadine Dorries (HarperCollins Publishers, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
