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.’”
