NADINE DORRIES on the Westminster plot to sabotage her bombshell book (2024)

In the paperback edition of her book exposing the Movement – the secret cabal she alleges is manipulating the Conservative Party – Nadine Dorries describes the pressure she came under not to publish – and the revenge that was taken on her when she insisted on going ahead…

During the year I was writing The Plot and in the weeks leading up to publication, I came under intense pressure to stop the book ever reaching the bookshops. All along I had done my best to keep a lid on what I was doing, but from 25 years working in Westminster I knew there was no such thing as a secret. MPs are as leaky as sieves and it was only ever going to be a matter of time before No 10 were on to me.

It took all of two months before they became aware of what I was writing.

I realised that the cat was out of the bag when, out of the blue, people I had no intention of speaking to began to message me and say they had information they wanted to share that I may find useful for the book.

The approaches rang an almighty klaxon of an alarm but I went ahead and met them anyway because they were colleagues, people I had worked with for many years. While some of them genuinely wanted to help, others had come with warnings and veiled threats which were at first subtle and then, when they went unheeded, became more overt.

I knew it would be all-out war when the list of nominations for House of Lords appointments that Boris Johnson had put forward in his resignation honours list was leaked to the media early and my name was on it.

‘Your nomination will be blocked,’ I was warned by one contact. ‘You will never be allowed to hold a public appointment again.’ Another said: ‘They never forget, these people, they’ll make your life a misery.’ A third advised me: ‘Look after yourself. You can ask them for anything in exchange for not publishing.’

That last one nearly got me. It came from a colleague I liked and respected. That’s how they work; it’s no accident that it was him. We were in 5 Hertford Street, a private members club in Mayfair where I conducted many of my interviews, and he glanced around the room as he leant towards me, swirling the remains of the white wine in his glass into a vortex.

‘You could have the chair of the BBC if you wanted it. Your old job [as culture and media secretary of state] back even. Think of yourself, not the effing party. That’ll be here long after you’re dead.’

Apparently he and all those other colleagues who were warning me thought I was totally mad for continuing with the book and not using my publishing contract and the information I had secured so far as leverage to propel myself further up the greasy pole. ‘Baroness Nadine – just think what that will mean to your granddaughter.’

This really did hit a nerve. For anyone of my background, the House of Lords seemed like a dream, an unattainable goal. I spent the first 20 years of my life on a council estate and there were times when I had to borrow shoes in order to attend school. I can remember what hunger feels like and what the sickening thud of the bailiff’s knock on the door sounds like.

At the age of 66, I had worked almost every day since the age of 14 when my working life began in a Liverpool ladies and children’s cut-price clothing store. I bought the clothes for my first child when she was born from the same shop as they were all I could afford.

I trained as a nurse and served ten years in the NHS. I started my own business when my second child arrived, quite literally using my bed as a desk by day, and at the same time working three 12-hour hospital night shifts over the weekend while my husband Paul watched the girls by day as I slept.

The hard work paid off and ten years later, in 1998, I sold the business to a major blue-chip company – for a sum which felt like a wild and unimaginable fortune – before beginning the slog to enter politics.

I served 18 years as an MP and climbed up every rung of the ministerial ladder, finishing in the Cabinet. I’m an author who has sold almost three million books, and now I am a columnist for Britain’s most widely read newspaper, the Daily Mail.

Did I think I deserved to be in the House of Lords? Of course I did. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved and I make no apologies whatsoever for believing I was worth it, more so than many of the people already in there with a limited track record of achievement who just happened to be somebody’s friend or did a dirty deed in return for an offer of preferment.

I admit I was tempted but I ignored the bribes, just as I ignored the threats. To any normal person, what was happening to me would be called blackmail. In Westminster, it’s business as usual.

The text messages from friends and senior political figures became increasingly alarming, if not outright paranoid. Check your brakes. Do you have CCTV? I appeared to be the only person who wasn’t scared. They are spooks, they are powerful, I was warned. I didn’t believe a word of it. These people trying to manipulate the party and shut me up were, and remain, deeply dysfunctional individuals who are nowhere near as clever as they would like everyone to think. Once it became clear I wasn’t going to play ball, negative news stories about me began to appear on a regular basis as the Movement turned up the heat, nearly always first published by reporters in The Times.

Social media sites and even the BBC began to accuse me of being absent from my Mid-Bedfordshire constituency. It was stated as fact that I hadn’t held a constituency surgery for more than a year, when in fact my last surgery had been two weeks before I resigned.

What’s more, I could prove it and so, with the help of my lawyers, I was able to stop the accusations being repeated in the mainstream media.

Then, on a balmy summer’s evening as the heat of the day began to fade and I was walking my dog in Battersea Park, I received a telephone call from The Times’ political editor, Steven Swinford. I’d always thought Steven was a decent man so when I heard his familiar, ‘Hello, my friend,’ down the line, I knew at once something was wrong.

‘Nadine,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen the list of nominations for the House of Lords to be announced tomorrow and look, I’m really sorry, I just thought you should know, your name isn’t on it.’

I’d been warned, but I still couldn’t quite believe him. I called Boris, who was in Egypt giving a speech. ‘That’s b***ocks,’ he roared. ‘I saw Rishi on Monday and he told me there would be no funny business and whoever’s name was passed to him from the House of Lords Appointment Committee [HOLAC], would be announced.

‘He told me he wasn’t going to play games. It’s Swinford, he’s winding you up. Let me make a call and I’ll get back to you.’

Boris duly came back on the phone. ‘Naaads,’ his voice boomed as he reassured me all was well. Sunak would never meddle with the precedent that an incoming Prime Minister doesn’t play around with the honours list of an outgoing Prime Minister. It was a dangerous game to play. After all, if Keir Starmer becomes the next Prime Minister, Rishi may rue the day.

I wasn’t so optimistic. I knew that throughout the six months’ clearance process for the Lords, Rishi had refused to pick up the phone to Boris.

In one of our conversations for The Plot, Boris had told me he was frustrated that Rishi wasn’t speaking to him.

The former Prime Minister’s club is still spectacularly small. It was extremely bad form for a Prime Minister who hadn’t won so much as a leadership election to snub the former Prime Minister with an historic track record of winning and keeping the Conservatives in power with a healthy majority.

I recalled a conversation I’d had with Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, who had been unofficially advising me and had acted as an interlocutor with Prime Minister Sunak and oversaw the process.

If I had known then what I know now, he would have been the last person I trusted to advise me and to facilitate the process. But back then I thought, he’s a civil servant, he has to abide by the Civil Service code and remain impartial. I was a naive fool.

Case told me all would be well, despite the situation being unusual in that – along with two other nominees – I was still a member of the House of Commons when nominated for the Lords.

But he said a precedent had been set for the Appointments Committee approving the placing of an elected politician into the Lords in the case of the Scottish Tory leader, Baroness Davidson (though she didn’t take her place following her nomination for two years).

I was to discover, however, that clever tactics were being used to block my nomination.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that once HOLAC begins the vetting process, checks are deemed to expire after six months. Which was why Sunak refused to speak to Boris or answer any of his messages before the six-month date had passed.

At exactly the point that date arrived, Boris received a call asking him to pop into No10 (a meeting Rishi’s aides tried to claim to journalists had never taken place, until they were confronted with the security log). In that meeting, Rishi told Boris he would announce the names HOLAC had passed to him.

What he didn’t tell Boris, though, was that the Committee had told No10 that I had to make a public announcement that I would stand down as an MP within six months of my name being announced and that, because the Committee is not permitted to communicate with any nominee directly, it was No10’s job to inform me of my obligation to do this.

But No10 did not inform me what I had to do; they deliberately didn’t pass the instruction on to me. So when Rishi promised Boris that he would announce whoever’s name was on the list he was, technically, speaking the truth. He knew my name wouldn’t be on the list because by not passing on the information from HOLAC, his people had engineered that I would be bumped off it.

The moment the news landed, Tory grandee and former party leader Michael Howard went on to the airwaves to insinuate that I hadn’t passed the vetting process, which was nonsense given I had only recently passed all the security checks required to serve in Cabinet.

The threats had come to pass.

Perhaps the clearest insight into the outrageous way these people operate came in July 2023 when Simon Case appeared before the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), whose chair was a young MP, William Wragg (now notorious for a sexting incident which led to him resigning the Conservative whip).

Wragg’s endless attacks on Boris when he was PM had confused everyone, because as an MP with the slimmest of majorities, it was quite clear it was only the popularity of Boris that had won him a seat in Parliament in 2019.

As the committee session was nearing an end, Wragg asked Simon Case: ‘The most recent set of resignation honours, and particularly peerages, has excited some public comment, and comment from former and lingering members of the House of Commons.

‘Are you aware of any forceful communications that were sent by the lingering Member for Mid Bedfordshire [ie, Nadine Dorries] to senior civil servants, in which she threatened to use the platform of the Commons and her television programme, to get to the bottom of why she has not been given a peerage?’

Case: ‘Yes, I was aware of those communications. And I have flagged them to the Chief Whip and to the Speaker of the House.’

Wragg: ‘Have you taken legal advice on whether the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 could have come into play?’

Case: ‘We are seeking further advice on that question.’

When I heard this, I was incapable of expression. I was in a parallel universe. Could the Cabinet Secretary really spin it like that? Of course, the answer was yes, it was happening before my very eyes.

Surely this was a set-up? Had a committee chair really conferred beforehand with a civil servant witness? Because if they hadn’t colluded, how on earth did Wragg know to question Case about ‘forceful communication’ to ‘senior civil servants’? And if they had colluded, wasn’t that at best a breach of the strictest Parliamentary protocol and at worst breaking the law.

The fact is that I had indeed sent a single stroppy text message to Case, which had now been blown out of all proportion. But at the time I was still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, which is why my message to him ended with two sincere apologies for being upset with him and a row of kisses. Hardly abusive. He responded in a profuse and apologetic manner.

And that was it. Just one single, heat of the moment, private message to the Cabinet Secretary. So how was it that the chair of the PACAC appeared to know about it if Case hadn’t told him? And what on earth was Case playing at by talking to the Whip’s office and the Speaker when he was supposed to be a neutral, non-political civil servant? It was absurd.

Shortly after this, emails began to arrive: to myself, to my agent, and to my publisher, from the Director of Propriety and Ethics in the Cabinet Office, requesting a copy of the book manuscript.

The ministerial code states that ‘Former Ministers intending to publish their memoirs are required to submit the draft manuscript to the Cabinet Secretary in good time before publication’. The rules were designed to prevent publication of material by former ministers that endangered national security, harmed the UK’s international reputation or breached confidentiality of government business.

And if the book had been a memoir of my time in office, I would have been obliged to comply.

But The Plot was not a memoir. It was wholly party political and had nothing to do with my role as a Cabinet member. I explained that, on these grounds, I wouldn’t be sending No10 the manuscript.

The Cabinet Office sent special advisers to inform the press lobby that I was in breach of the rules. They ramped up the pressure on my publisher and my agent. It was apparent they were desperately trying to lay their hands on a copy.

At the same time, letters from libel lawyers arrived. One high-profile individual managed to use the law to conceal the worst of his sexually inappropriate and abusive behaviour and the fact that he was an organiser of parties in the Partygate scandal.

There are civil servants today working in key departmental roles who are protected by him and have remained completely under the radar.

When I made TV appearances to promote the book, the producers would receive a warning letter from this particular individual’s solicitors an hour before I was due to appear on air, which always spooked them. But, knowing what I know, I won’t give up until the day comes when I can name and shame him, because he was breaking the law while paid by the public purse, and people deserve to know.

Two days before serialisation of the book was due to begin in this newspaper, I received an email from the Cabinet Office which informed me I was now toast. It said that if I published before handing the book to the Cabinet Office, I would never be appointed to the Lords in the future or ever hold public office.

That message can also be read in reverse. They appear to have thought I was still open to bribes.

I shared that last email with the editor of the Daily Mail, Ted Verity. With 48 hours to go, we both had the same thought: that if they slapped an injunction on the book in the next 24 hours, it and the serialisation would never see the light of day.

They wouldn’t have been able to stop publication, but they could have kicked it into the legal long grass. My agent and I thought there was a very real chance of that happening.

Verity’s response was to say: ‘Let’s move the serialisation forward. Let’s publish tomorrow.’ Which is what happened. But there is part of me that wonders what would have happened to the book if he hadn’t bravely taken that spur-of-the-moment decision to print the first extract of the serialisation the following morning.

The paperback edition of The Plot: The Shocking Inside Story of Who Really Runs Britain by Nadine Dorries, featuring brand new material, is released on 4 July (£10.99, HarperCollins)

© Nadine Dorries 2024. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid to 13/07/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.