Has there ever been anything more British than the reaction to Nadine Dorries’s book? The former culture secretary has penned a volume titled The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, which is currently being serialised in the Mail titles and will be published on Thursday. Nadine has not so much chucked a dead cat on the table as claimed that a dark lord figure at the heart of Downing Street once chopped up his ex-girlfriend’s kid brother’s rabbit and nailed it to a door. I assume it is already No 1 in Amazon’s highly competitive political bunnycide category. The Mail even seems to have tracked down the alleged boy owner of the alleged rabbit, who is now a grownup and, after confirming that “something happened”, has offered an entry to the annals of Revelatory British Political Quotes 2016-The Present Day. Here it is: “I definitely had a rabbit, and I don’t now. [My parents] don’t want to talk about the rabbit, they’ve kept the same line. That I had a rabbit, and then I didn’t have a rabbit, which is normal with pets.”
Totally normal. Another hugely normal dispatch from our hugely normal country, in fact. But there’s more. Nadine has also slammed on to the table the claim that British Conservative governments are run by a cabal of shadowy figures known as “the movement”. And everyone has … just got on with their afternoon tea as if nothing has happened. Bond villain codename for a guy who fleeces donors and trashes their houses and currently advises Rishi Sunak? I wonder if you wouldn’t mind passing the scones. MP shagging a sex worker on a billiard table while four other MPs cheered him on? Just a little more milk in it, thank you so much. Boris and Carrie Johnson’s £112,549 Downing Street refurb consisted of having the dining room wall painted red to celebrate the red wall victories? This fruitcake really is quite delicious.
Speaking of fruitcake, questions have been asked as to whether this exposé is an exposé of actual things that happen in Downing Street, or an exposé of Nadine’s credulity/state of mind after not getting a peerage. The reaction and media pickup of the serialisation would tend to indicate most news outlets have alighted on the latter explanation. Much British political coverage has remained stubbornly fixed not on dead rabbits, but on vital matters such as the Covid inquiry, which is serving up daily confirmation of former comms chief Lee Cain’s assessment that Covid was “the wrong crisis” for Johnson’s “skillset”. (You wonder what “the right crisis” would have been? I somehow picture breathless aides summoning Johnson to Cobra and going: “Prime minister, someone who isn’t one of your wives urgently needs to get pregnant and left to bring up the child on her own.”)
Anyway, by way of welcome byproducts, it would be nice to think that Nadine’s failure to burn down the whole Conservative government with her book would lead to the permanent demise of the phrase “dead cat”. This expression first made meaningful landfall with the political chatterati during the 2015 general election, when the Australian strategist Lynton Crosby was running David Cameron’s campaign, and had served up some distracting nastiness about the Miliband brothers and Trident. Isabel Hardman in the Spectator glossed it by explaining Crosby’s view that if you threw something disgusting on the metaphorical dining room table, everyone would deplore you but they’d be talking about that rather than the thing that was causing you real grief. Alas, through absolutely no fault of Isabel’s own, a deceased feline monster was born. Ever since, the phrase “dead cat” has served as the default explanation for armchair campaign strategists seeking to explain why anything from a scandal to a war is actually just a “dead cat” to distract the sheeple from the real story.
As for Nadine’s claim that someone at the heart of current British Conservative politics was once on remand for alleged arson … well, it’s certainly a metaphor. It sits in the skip fire alongside the seemingly endless allegations of sexual assault coming out of Westminster (not a problem restricted solely to the Tory party, it should be said). Two weeks ago, another Conservative MP was arrested on suspicion of rape (he denies it); by last weekend, a passage in Dorries’s book had alleged that former Tory party chair Jake Berry had written to police when he took office and promptly discovered that the party had allegedly covered up a series of rape allegations against another one of its MPs. Another former party chairman, Oliver Dowden, is now deputy prime minister, and on Sunday Dowden explained he “can’t say” whether or not his party paid for a victim of this alleged attacker to receive private medical treatment. Sorry, but I rather feel he should be able to say.
So bits of Dorries’s book might be hilariously mad, bits of it might be unproven, and bits of it might be horribly true. Arguably, the mere existence of The Plot – by someone who was a cabinet minister until relatively recently – is but one indication that the government and the wider political culture are very much on fire. Also arguably, the muted reaction to The Plot is a symptom of the past few years in that particular political culture, which might reasonably have left people thinking of their country as the sort of place where these gothically grotesque things probably do happen, increasingly to the point of being unremarkable. So does that mean that Nadine’s dead cat is alive, or dead on arrival? Without resorting to that other beloved metaphor for British political coverage, I can’t help feeling it can be both.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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