“It’s all perfectly simple,” says Christopher Howse in The Daily Telegraph. According to Nadine Dorries’s new book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, the former PM was brought down not by his own calamitous mistakes, but by a shadowy cabal of powerful insiders: “the Dark Lord” (Dominic Cummings), “Voldemort” (Michael Gove), “the Wolf” (Dougie Smith, whoever he is), and “Dr No” (who is never identified). And it’s not just Johnson. “The Movement” has apparently been pulling strings inside the Conservative Party for decades. Dorries, who became a bestselling fiction writer during her 18 years as an MP, says she learned the “full sordid horror” of this dastardly conspiracy from some aptly nicknamed informants: “Moneypenny, Skyfall, Thumper, Bambi, and M”.
The details are quite something, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. We are told that “Dr No” once chopped up a rabbit belonging to his ex-girlfriend’s younger brother and “nailed it to a door”. That an MP had sex with a prostitute on a billiards table “while four other MPs cheered him on”. That Boris and Carrie’s £112,549 Downing Street refurb included painting the dining room wall red to celebrate his Red Wall victories. Much of it is “hilariously mad”, of course. But there’s a good chance bits of it are “horribly true”. And the “mere existence” of this book – by someone who was a cabinet minister only a couple of years ago – is a pretty damning indictment of the “wider political culture”.
The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson is available to buy here.