Nadine Dorries never quite felt she belonged around the Cabinet table. Seated between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Scottish secretary Alister Jack, she would joke that all three came from estates but only hers was a council one. Yet privately, the girl who left school at 16 felt intimidated. “I was scared stiff to speak, so I did it in jokes,” she says, over tea at a Kensington hotel. “I did it with scouse humour and that was like my coat of armour.” In her new book The Plot, which claims to identify shadowy forces behind Boris Johnson’s downfall, Dorries writes that when a contact asks to meet at fancy London restaurant the Wolseley, she worries she won’t understand the menu. Seriously? “I’ve never been to many posh restaurants!” she cries. ‘I don’t socialise in London, I socialise in the countryside where I live! But I think it was the person I was meeting at the Wolseley that made me nervous.” She says even the Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti recently gave her a kindly pep talk about overcoming impostor syndrome.
We meet the morning after David Cameron’s surprise return to government, gift-wrapped in a peerage despite his involvement in the Greensill lobbying scandal. Dorries, who famously quit parliament after being denied the peerage for which Johnson nominated her, is incensed. “As long as you’ve been to Eton, someone just has a word with the king and pop, in you go. It doesn’t matter that you’ve lobbied ministers and chancellors and former prime ministers to try and make yourself shedloads of money during the pandemic,” she says, witheringly. “This is all about rehabilitating David. He’s been seven years on the grouse moors now, so he’s obviously a bit bored.” Recently, someone who was shooting with Cameron in Scotland WhatsApped her after her name arose in conversation: her spies are everywhere. “I heard last week from somebody in No 10, who said to me: ‘Oh my effing God, your book has exploded in here, they are going nuts.’”
Dorries is 66 but looks decades younger, confessing readily to Botox and monthly medical-grade facials. “I’d never do anything that involved a general anaesthetic but microneedling, laser treatments – I bloody love them.” Apparently the microneedling hurts, but she says that is the price of launching a broadcasting career (on TalkTV) at an age where many women vanish from the screen: “I wouldn’t be doing it if I wasn’t on telly.” Famously outspoken, she’s also an unusually sensitive listener, cajoling some eyebrow-raising stories from the anonymous sources she uses for her book. But can the elaborate theory she has constructed – that for decades a shadowy group called “the movement”, centred on Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings, Tory spin doctor-turned-BBC executive Robbie Gibb and an obscure fixer called Dougie Smith, sought to control Tory fates and install or remove leaders – possibly be true?
“Nothing happens by accident for those guys with influence and money and connections and I think we’ve seen that with the appointment of David Cameron,” says Dorries. She’s convinced “the movement” orchestrated the last reshuffle (after Nadhim Zahawi was sacked over his tax affairs), but that this week’s was masterminded by ex-leader William Hague, who confusingly has only a walk-on part in The Plot. Despite Hague ridiculing the idea of a plot, sources close to Gove calling Dorries a “very talented fiction author” and Cummings sarcastically congratulating her on unmasking a “giant conspiracy”, she remains undaunted. Today, she predicts the new home secretary (and potential leadership contender) James Cleverly will be the group’s next target. “These guys know exactly who they want the next leader to be, and they will remove all of the obstacles in the way to get to that point, and the next obstacle is James Cleverly because the person they have in mind is Kemi Badenoch.” Minutes later, however, she’s suggesting Cameron’s return is “a way to get George Osborne into a safe seat and to pop him into leader of the opposition” post-election. Hang on, wasn’t Badenoch the chosen one? Swiftly, she rallies: “This is the change now. William Hague coming in is to stop that happening …” And she moves on to why someone told the papers Badenoch and Gove have fallen out, and – well, I’m running out of space.
On the one hand, this is what politicians and journalists do endlessly in private: divining entrails, parsing every word or deed – rightly or wrongly – for hidden meanings. But on the other - well, does she understand why people accuse her of peddling conspiracy theories?
“I understand how people might want to put that spin on it because people from the left do not want the lid taken off the Boris Johnson coffin, the man who won two mayoral elections, delivered Brexit and won a bigger vote share than Tony Blair,” she says, stoutly. “But the book is not my words – it’s former chancellors, present cabinet ministers.” And all backed up, she swears, by multiple sources.
Perhaps the most compelling question about The Plot nonetheless is how a woman shrewd enough to brand Cameron and Osborne “posh boys who don’t know the price of milk” came to believe so deeply in a man like Johnson. Born in Liverpool in 1957, Dorries grew up hiding from the rent man and borrowing shoes to go to school. “I know what being hungry is like,” she says. Her parents divorced in her teens, and she met her future husband Paul at 17. “I was a nurse and he was a miner,” she says, and they had to work hard “to make sure our kids didn’t have the background that we did”. Having made her money from a successful childcare business, she entered Westminster in 2005 after working for the Tory MP Oliver Letwin, but still spent years battling the feeling it wasn’t for someone like her.
Her first brush with the dark arts of politics came in 2009, when the then Treasury aide Damian McBride resigned over secret emails exchanged with an ex-Labour staffer about the possibility of spreading salacious untrue stories about Tories – including Dorries – online. “I was a brand-new MP, I knew nobody and nothing, and suddenly I found myself in the middle of this scandal,” she says, although it’s worth noting that by then she had been a backbencher for four years. Since then she has been stalked, had death threats, been labelled “Mad Nads” by colleagues – which, having lost a cousin to suicide, she particularly dislikes, “because I think it denigrates those people who really do suffer from mental illness” – and temporarily lost the whip for going on the reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get me Out of Here!. When Nigel Farage asked her advice before joining this year’s cast, she counselled laying off booze, cigarettes and his mobile phone beforehand to avoid withdrawal symptoms that will make him irritable in the jungle: she thinks he’ll do well, though viewers shouldn’t expect much Brexit debate. “People who watch aren’t interested in politics, and ITV producers know that.”
An early cheerleader for Johnson, she wept when Gove derailed his 2016 leadership campaign by defecting. But in 2019, she was rewarded with a job as health minister. Later promoted to culture secretary, she served only a year in Cabinet. The greatest regret of her life, however, is not political.
In the book, she writes lovingly of her late husband, with whom she raised three daughters. In 2007, they separated, blaming pressures of work, but remained close – “we still had lunch every Sunday together, and he still put the bins out for me when I was stuck in London” – and after his cancer diagnosis in 2019, she nursed him at home to the end. She bitterly regrets not reconciling earlier and is clearly not over his death. “It’s the biggest regret of my life and his,” she says. “At the end, you know, they were almost the last words we said to each other.” And with that, she bursts into tears. “It’s been four years and it still gets me – we spent every single day and every minute from his diagnosis to his death together to try and make up ...”
Sadly, it’s not her first such loss. Dorries was only 21 when she found her father lying dead at home, and subsequently lost her younger brother in an accident. “The only men I loved in my life have died,” she says, adding that the grief if anything accumulates with time. Yet still she faces snide suggestions that she must be secretly in love with Johnson to defend him. “It’s so pathetic, isn’t it? I’m closer to Carrie, actually. I feel like Carrie’s second mum.”
Dorries first took Johnson’s wife under her wing when he was hospitalised with Covid, and Carrie was heavily pregnant. “What really annoys me is nobody would say I was in love with Carrie, and yet I speak to Carrie most days,” she says. “If anyone gets misogynistic attacks, she does … Somebody said to me the other day: ‘Oh well, Boris has gone all woke, hasn’t he, on the green issues, that must have been Carrie.’ His father has been a lifelong environmentalist. Why would somebody blame Carrie and not blame Stanley, who’s been an influence throughout his life?”
That she identifies so strongly with Boris Johnson is more surprising. But she insists that having gone to Eton on a scholarship, he too is an outsider. “I always felt very similar to Boris,” she says. “His background was maybe not as tragic as mine but he was from the same place as me. They despised him in the same way they despised me.”
There are bigger victims in her book than the former prime minister, however. The bleakest chapter details allegations of rape and sexual violence by Tory MPs, including claims the Conservative party funded psychiatric treatment for the alleged victim of one serial offender. (Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, has denied any coverup.) “It was like a new level of depravity – that did blow me sideways,” she says. She claims that she didn’t go to the police with the allegations because the police already knew. “I got that information because I was shown the police reports,” she says, claiming that the investigations are still ongoing. But she feels the party could have supported complainants better and earlier, thus preventing future victims. “I know predatory behaviour is everywhere but it seems to me there is a concentration of it in Westminster.” She sounds genuinely anguished, yet her book skips relatively lightly over the scandal that finished Johnson: allegations that the then deputy chief whip Chris Pincher groped a male MP, and that Johnson had appointed him despite warnings. Why give him such an easy pass?
At first she says he was simply failed by his advisers, an excuse she also advances over partygate. But when pressed, she says she didn’t understand a prime minister being removed over what she considers to be “quite minor” behaviour compared with what else happens in Westminster.
Equally surprisingly, she denies Johnson – widely suspected of undermining Theresa May – was a plotter himself. “He may have responded to situations as they arose, in a way that anybody who was hoping to rescue the Conservative party at the time to deliver Brexit and to be prime minister would respond,” she says, indignantly. “But there is nothing he did to actively remove Theresa May.” The difference, apparently, is that “the movement” don’t just respond but actively plan events.
Though what she calls “the movement’s” ideology – craving closeness to power, wanting to promote its favourite leader – sounds remarkably like ugly old politics as usual, Cummings’ admission that he pondered ousting Johnson within days of the 2019 election remains the jaw-droppingly unusual exception. (Johnson’s theory, she says, is that Cummings’ behaviour is “something to do with his father”, an oil industry project manager, and that his fascination with grand projects suggests a wish to emulate his success.)
Reviewers haven’t loved The Plot, but some panned her three novels, too, and they have since sold 3m copies. “When you come from a background where you know hunger, that doesn’t bother you. When you get paid lovely advances and you earn lots of money from royalties, do you care?” She wrote The Plot not for political nerds anyway, she explains, but “for the fishmonger’s wife in Grimsby” curious about what it’s really like inside.
Despite everything, she’ll still vote for Rishi Sunak at a general election because “I’ve paid hard to be a Conservative. When you come from my background, Labour is your natural path of entry into Westminster, so I’ve paid personally and I’ve paid politically.”
But she predicts a Tory wipeout in which it’s unclear who will even survive to contest the leadership. She doesn’t buy the wilder rumours about Farage somehow ending up as Tory leader, and isn’t sure Johnson wants a comeback now he’s “earning absolutely shedloads of money” and living the dream in Oxfordshire. I leave her en route to a Mayfair bookshop, where a mystery individual wants 60 signed copies. Is someone giving The Plot to all their friends for Christmas, or buying it up to hide the truth? Read all about it, maybe, in the paperback.
• 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
