The moment this piece is published, I will be tendering my resignation to the editor. I have failed him, I have failed the Observer and I have failed you, its readers. In my 30 years as chief political commentator of this newspaper, I have been oblivious to a conspiracy of sweeping and malevolent scope that has been machinating away to ruthlessly raise up and then ruin Tory leaders. It is a story, which can be told at last thanks to the tenacity and courage of Nadine Dorries, “of a damning trail of treachery and deceit by an obsessive pursuit of power, which threatens to topple the very fabric of our democracy”. Fabric-toppling treachery and deceit? How did I miss that? It is a small consolation that everyone else in British political journalism failed to see it as well. Unless, and here’s a thought to chill the bones, they are all furtively complicit in the schemes of these dastardly plotters.
My history of failing to see what should have been obvious begins with the removal of Iain Duncan Smith as Tory leader in 2003. I thought Conservative MPs fired him because he was so embarrassingly useless at the job that some of them nicknamed him In Deep Shit. Nadine – or Nads as she is known to her admirers – removes the scales from our eyes by revealing that IDS’s brilliant career was brutally terminated by a clandestine cabal functioning at the core of the Tory party who call themselves “The Movement”. It gets scarier. Naive fool that I was, I thought Theresa May’s premiership disintegrated because she threw away her majority with a calamitous campaign at the 2017 general election and then couldn’t produce a Brexit deal that parliament was prepared to vote for. How could you be so blind, Rawnsley? That fine woman was another victim of The Movement, “a small group of men, most of them unelected and some totally unknown outside the Westminster bubble, operating at the heart of the Conservative party over the past 25 years and controlling its destiny”. It gets worse. I thought Liz Truss only lasted at Number 10 for 49 days because of the lunacy of her infamous “mini-budget”, which crashed sterling, blew up the gilts market and unleashed so much mayhem that she was forced to sack her chancellor shortly before she met her own end. Her fall was nothing to do with wrecking the economy, Nads can reveal. Ms Truss was “undermined” by the hidden hand of The Movement, one of whose operators compiled a dirty dossier of untrue nasties about her, which was no less destabilising of her premiership for the fact that it has never been published.
Nads, honest soul that she is, confesses that she had doubts about committing to print what she has found out because it meant risking all she held dear. “I had to face what would be the hardest decision of my life: do I carry on (in cabinet) or do I step down to write this book?” she confides. The sound of violins to be inserted here. “I would have to give up everything I loved, the job, possibly even my role as an MP.” What dedication to the truth she has displayed by going ahead with The Plot even though it meant vacating the cabinet seat that she so adorned with her shimmering intellect and subtle grace, as well as setting aside her legendary dedication to the constituents of Mid Bedfordshire. I don’t know about you, but I’m misting over at her selfless spirit.
Now we must address the most sensational conspiracy of the lot, the one that brought down Nads’s splendid friend, Boris Johnson, and just when that hero was in his prime. If you were as duped as I was, you will have thought that what did for him was the Owen Paterson scandal and the Chris Pincher scandal and all the other scandals, not least the monster scandal called Partygate. There was also the mass resignation of ministers in the summer of 2022 when even Conservative MPs said they could no longer stomach any more of his debaucheries and his mendacities. It has taken Nads, a woman of peerless investigative skills matched with unimaginable levels of integrity, to tell the dark truth. “A plot was afoot to remove” her friend even before the 2019 election because he had “served his purpose” for The Movement who wanted him out of Number 10 so they could install their “Manchurian candidate”. That, of course, would be Rishi Sunak.
“Parties, my arse. He (Boris) was never at any parties,” says one of Nads’s confidential informants when they rendezvous for a clandestine briefing. For the protection of herself and her “sources”, Nads meets them at venues carefully selected to be discreet, such as a Mayfair club and a Westminster pub. She has also had the privilege of interviewing the former prime minister himself and he swears to her, so it must be true, that he knew nothing of parties and he was at no parties. The whole thing was “like Salem” of the witch trials. So insists Mr Johnson with the plausibility for which he is renowned. But hang on, don’t I remember seeing photographs taken inside Number 10 of him with a drink in his hand at a party? And don’t I recall that he paid an uncontested police fine for lockdown busting? And that the Met issued more than 100 fines in all to the denizens of his Downing Street? Perhaps you remember that too. This Movement must somehow have the ability to imprint us all with false memories.
Smart woman that she is, Nads will have anticipated that naysayers, almost certainly themselves stooges of The Movement, will attempt to discredit her fearless work by calling this book a pyramid of preposterous piffle written by a woman vengefully furious that Mr Sunak denied her the peerage she had been promised by Mr Johnson.
So let us be clear that Nads has scrupulously substantiated her claims by interviewing key “sources”. It is unfortunate that so many of them are anonymous, but that is an inevitable feature of dealing with a conspiracy as sinister as this one. One of these sources she codenames “Moneypenny”. Another is disguised as “M”. You may sense a theme here. Two others she calls “Bambi and Thumper”. Connoisseurs of the adversaries of James Bond, to whom Boris Johnson does indeed bear a striking resemblance, will know Bambi and Thumper as henchpersons of Spectre, an organisation that Ernst Stavro Blofeld made almost as scary as The Movement.
What you really need to know is the identity of the puppet masters of this vast conspiracy that has been making and breaking Tory leaders all these years, including the finest Conservative prime minister who ever lived. Name the guilty men, Nads. Here, if I may venture a criticism of the author, she’s a bit of a letdown, pleading that “the legals” prevent her from full disclosure. She cannot put a real name to “the most mysterious figure of all, a character we shall have to call ‘Dr No’, who wields enormous influence, whom everyone is scared of, though his name is never mentioned”. She tells us that Dr No secretly works for Mr Sunak and is “rumoured” to have once put the frighteners on someone by nailing to a door the dead pet rabbit of his ex-girlfriend’s kid brother. I haven’t slept since I read that. Nads also points the finger at an obscure party apparatchik. “Hardly any MPs know who either of them are.” God, these people are so clever: virtually no one has heard of them and yet absolutely everyone is scared witless by them. The apparatchik is codenamed, she says, “The Wolf”. I hear you object that there is no such character in the Bond adventures. That’s because he gets his alias from the mobster played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. Do keep up. Then there’s “The Dark Lord” – we are now on Harry Potter films – whom you will better know as Dominic Cummings. And we’re back to Bond with “Oddjob”. Obviously, that has to be Michael Gove.
From the outside looking in, they don’t look like very accomplished conspirators. Govey has never held one of the big offices of state and failed in both his attempts to become Tory leader. Cummings ran amok in Downing Street for a while, but Johnson sacked him as an adviser less than a year after the 2019 election. Ah, but I suppose that just confirms their Machiavellian wiles, pretending to be so much less powerful than they truly are. After his exposure by Nads, Dr No has – and how typically devious this is – made no comment. Gove and Cummings, meanwhile, have sought to laugh it off, the latter smirking: “She’s right, there was a giant conspiracy including MI6, the CIA and, most crucially, the KGB special operations department. It’s a tribute to Nadine she has figured this out. The movement wishes her well.” You’re not fooling anyone with that, Dark Lord. We see you now, we see you.
I will give the last word to an expert on conspiracies who has hailed Nads on Twitter/X by saying she has confirmed “what I have been writing for 30 years and this is only part of it”. David Icke, whose commendation of this author is her highest recommendation, added: “Another clique owns the Labour party and both cliques answer to a higher clique – the Cult.”
The Cult! There’s your sequel, Nads.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
• The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson by Nadine Dorries is published by HarperCollins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
