“Advisers advise, ministers decide,” goes Margaret Thatcher’s aphorism. But if Nadine Dorries is right, one Conservative adviser has the power to elevate and overthrow prime ministers and has been exercising it for two decades.
Some might accuse Dorries of hyperbole. But even to more reserved figures in the Conservative party, the Tory fixer Dougie Smith is a mysterious and unnerving character.
He has been employed in an undefined role under successive Tory prime ministers including David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. Former colleagues who have encountered him in government describe feeling unsure what his job was and to whom he was answerable.
Used to operating in the shadows, Smith now finds himself in the spotlight after reports he has been advising a group plotting to replace Rishi Sunak before the next election. “He definitely wants Rishi out,” one Tory insider said.
It seems an extraordinary situation that someone who is apparently employed by the Conservative party is being accused of working to overthrow its leader. Tories’ answer to the obvious question – why doesn’t Sunak just sack Smith? – is that he has been around too long and knows where all the bodies are buried.
Little information about Smith is publicly available. Though he has worked for the Conservative party since around 2002, there are no records of his education and employment history online and he does not appear on the government’s list of special advisers. A Telegraph profile in 2022 reported that he was born in an Edinburgh suburb in May 1962 and studied at the University of Strathclyde but dropped out before his final year.
In Westminster, perhaps the most often-cited fact about him is that he reportedly organised swingers’ sex parties for wealthy clients in the 1990s and early 2000s. When this was exposed in a national newspaper, Smith insisted that his political and private activities “don’t overlap” and even boasted that his clients were like “the SAS of sex”.
Asked about reports that Smith was now involved in a plot against the prime minister, Sunak’s press secretary told reporters on Wednesday: “There’s a lot of speculation around … All I can say in terms of the government side and what the PM’s focused on is that we’re getting on with the day job.” Conservative Campaign Headquarters was approached and said it did not comment on HR issues.
In her book The Plot, Dorries claims Sunak is just the latest in a long line of Tory leaders Smith has targeted. Others who have worked with him say the reason he has been part of Tory furniture for so long – despite turnover at the top of the party – is that successive leaders have benefited from his political instincts and deep knowledge of the party and its membership.
A former adviser in Johnson’s government said Smith’s status as a “legacy” figure in the party gave him authority in government. “He would dip in and out of things he was interested in,” they said. “He had that quite rare ability to walk into a room and have no one ask: ‘What are you doing here? What is your interest in this?’”
One of his focus areas, according to the same aide, was helping Johnson avoid potential bear traps. “We’d be in a position where something could land the PM in shit and we’d need to sort something out. Then Dougie would appear and he would offer some views and some strategy.”
Smith would also liaise with Tory MPs and he was for a time tasked with what the aide described as “Carrie [Johnson] management”. “In the early days when Carrie was having issues – which were broadly ‘there’s too much interest in me, how do I manage this?’ – he became her person for a while,” they said.
Smith’s loyalty to Boris Johnson appears to have eventually waned. Dorries’ book includes an interview with Johnson who told her that in 2021 Smith called him and allegedly told him to resign because he was “poison like Nixon”.
Smith’s wife, Munira Mirza, who worked as Johnson’s policy chief in Downing Street, quit in 2022, attacking Johnson’s unsubstantiated claim that Keir Starmer had allowed Jimmy Savile to escape justice while he was director of public prosecutions.
Smith and Mirza are interested in social and cultural debates, including on race and gender. The Tory insider cited above said Smith was “obsessed with woke issues”.
It is perhaps unsurprising then that he has been linked to Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary and Tory culture warrior, amid claims that the plotters want to make her party leader.
A third former special adviser recalls suspicions during Johnson’s government that Smith was trying to get Badenoch installed as education secretary. “He and Munira saw education as a place to fight culture wars and push back against progressive, trendy stuff,” they said.
If somehow Badenoch comes to replace Sunak with Smith’s help, one of the claims in Dorries’ book will come true. Or as the same adviser put it: “Maybe she’s not in the fiction section after all.”
