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?
