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.
