8 ridiculous claims in Nadine Dorries' book on the downfall of Boris Johnson
Nadine Dorries has published a book about the downfall of her hero Boris Johnson.
The tome, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, is being serialised in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday and has provoked a wave of mockery for her conspiracy theories, use of James Bond characters and shameless defence of the former Prime Minister. Here we take a look at some of the more bizarre claims to have emerged in the thousands of words printed so far.
Dr No and the rabbit
The most eye-catching and dramatic of Ms Dorries’ unusual allegations is of a Tory fixer in No10 who chopped a former girlfriend’s pet rabbit into four pieces and nailed it to her family’s front door.
She said the shadowy figure known as “Dr No” had also tried to set fire to a house while children were sleeping inside. Ms Dorries also accuses the man of being behind dirty dossiers of untrue sex claims about Liz Truss and her husband. She writes of the unnamed figure: “When a girlfriend ended their relationship, it is rumoured that he had her little brother's pet rabbit chopped into four and nailed to the front door of the family home to greet him when he got home from school, in true Mafia style.” The Daily Mail said it had spoken to the brother in question who told the newspaper: “I definitely had a rabbit, and I don't now.”
A red Red Wall
Ms Dorries took aim at reports the then PM and his now wife Carrie Johnson decorated their Downing Street flat with gold wallpaper in a garish makeover by interior designer Lulu Lyttle.
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In fact, embittered ex-MP Ms Dorries claims, “it never existed. It wasn’t quoted for; it was never hung. Does such a thing even exist?” No, the real story of the accommodation revamp was even weirder. “What Boris and Carrie did was have the dining room wall painted red to celebrate the red-wall victories in the Election,” she claims.
That is, they painted their dining room wall in the colour red to reflect the fact Mr Johnson owed his 80-seat majority at the 2019 general election largely to Tory candidates ousting Labour in the party’s former strongholds.
Boris Johnson never attended a lockdown-busting party
That’s the same Boris Johnson who accepted a £50, uncontested fine for attending a lockdown-busting party on his birthday, in the Cabinet Room.
Ms Dorries writes: “As the No10 aide who had first pleaded with me to write about all this put it: ‘Parties, my a***. He was never at any parties; if he was, that’s what the police would have fined him for — not for being with a group of people, of which Rishi [Sunak] was one, that he worked and met with all day, walking into his office to sing Happy Birthday while he was sat at his desk.”
Nadine Dorries is Boris Johnson's biggest fan (James Veysey/TalkTV/REX/Shutterstock)In fact, he didn’t even know about parties
Former Culture Secretary Ms Dorries insists her hero was unaware of what was going on in the property in which he lived. “I established that there was a Downing Street tradition, going back to the Tony Blair days, of the people in the press office getting together on a Friday night. The parties weren't a new thing but they went to a new and debauched level, messy affairs where things got broken and wine was spilt up walls,” she writes. “But my understanding was that Boris didn't have a clue about them because, on Fridays, he was in his Uxbridge constituency or up at one of the red-wall seats, and he went straight from there to Chequers for the weekend.”
In fact, the Commons Privileges Committee investigation into Mr Johnson’s behaviour over Partyagte and his subsequent denials to Parliament, found he was "unlikely to have been unaware" of a gathering attended by dozens of staff in No10 Downing Street's press office in December 2020.
Evidence was heard that he had to walk past the press office as he went upstairs to his flat.
Top civil servant “worked for Prince William”
Ms Dorries’ book confides: “I have been told by a source that (Simon) Case was ‘let go’ from No10 during the time of Theresa May and went to work for the Royal Household as Private Secretary to Prince William.”
Wow, where did she find such a scoop?
It’s a matter of public record that Simon Case, now Britain's top civil servant as the Cabinet Secretary, was appointed director-general Northern Ireland and Ireland in January 2018, where he acted as the lead civil servant for finding a solution to the problem of the 310-mile border between Northern Ireland and the Republic - the UK’s only land border with the EU. Also is it a matter of public record that in March 2018, it was announced that Mr Case would be the next Private Secretary to William, then the Duke of Cambridge and now the Prince of Wales. Mr Case took up the appointment in July 2018.
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Partygate claims “crumbled away”
Ms Dorries gives airtime to Mr Johnson’s ongoing defence of Partygate - first revealed by the Mirror - including trying to discredit the bombshell report by senior civil servant Sue Gray, who is now Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.
Ms Dorries reports the ex-Premier as saying: “We tried, after Sue Gray’s report appeared, to track down the sources of her allegations. It all just crumbled away.” Well, the police didn’t think the Partygate allegations “all just crumbled away”. Concluding their investigations in May 2022, the force said the inquiry had led to a total of 126 fines being issued to 83 people for events happening across eight different dates.
It was all Chris Pincher’s fault, or was it?
Flying back from a NATO summit in Madrid in July 2022, Mr Johnson discovered his Deputy Chief Whip had become embroiled in a sex scandal the previous evening at a Tory drinking den.
The fallout eventually led to Mr Johnson being toppled. But Ms Dorries’ book includes claims trying to lay the blame on Michael Gove, claiming Mr Johnson’s advisers were secretly loyal to his longstanding rival.
“The people around him (Mr Johnson) weren’t working for him, but for Gove, or someone else, certainly not for him. ‘And that’s when the . . . you know, the bottom-pinching guy... what was his name? Chris Pincher. Pincher, a gay man, had too much to drink in the Carlton Club bar and wrongly grabbed another man’s bottom; that was what precipitated the beginning of the end,” say the book extracts. “‘Does that make sense to you? The reason why it doesn’t is because they were waiting for anything to get him, and once that anything, no matter how small, came along, they would blow it up, using Twitter and social media and every Remain journalist, the BBC, Sky, every Leftie, but mostly, Conservative MPs.’”
However, many in Westminster believe what led to the PM being ousted over the Pincher affair was not what happened at the Carlton Club but the fact Mr Johnson knew of previous allegations about the MP. Critics also pointed out the then PM had been less than forthcoming about what he knew when over his ally.
Mr Johnson was made aware of a formal complaint about Mr Pincher's "inappropriate behaviour" while Mr Pincher was a Foreign Office Minister from 2019-20. The complaint led to a disciplinary process which confirmed his misconduct.
Dorries’ surprise about advisers in Westminster
She writes that “my intention when I started to research this book was to tell the story of how Boris Johnson was ousted from power. Instead, what I uncovered was a small group of men, most of them unelected and some totally unknown outside of a tight Westminster bubble, who have been operating at the heart of the Conservative Party over the past 25 years and controlling its destiny”.
She goes on: “They are, I can reveal, former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings, Tory Party apparatchik Dougie Smith and Secretary of State Michael Gove, plus the most mysterious individual of all, a character we shall have to call ‘Dr No’, who wields enormous influence, whom everyone was scared of, though his name is never mentioned.” Ms Dorries, who was an MP for 18 years, appears shocked to discover powerful, male-dominated cliques in Westminster, loyal to certain cadres - and that most people outside SW1A don’t even know who they are. She believes this shadowy “Movement” brought down her tragic hero.
Still, at least one person seems convinced.
Internet conspiracy theorist David Icke hailed her intervention on Twitter/X last week saying it was “what I have been writing for 30 years and this is only part of it”. He added: “Former Minister Nadine Dorries on the shadowy clique manipulating the Tory Party for 20 years (Another clique owns the Labour Party and both cliques answer to a higher clique - the Cult).”
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