The Four Streets: Volume 1

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Boris Johnson campaigning for the Tory leadership in 2019, with Nadine Dorries and Liz Truss. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA We know this because it played out in public. We know that 54 Tory MPs submitted letters of no confidence in Mr Johnson to the 1922 Committee.

The same source claimed Johnson and Sunak had dinner together the night before Sunak resigned in July 2022. The source said: “Of course the next day Rishi blindsided Boris and resigned. Yeah, genuinely, even for a cut-throat world that was very shitty behaviour.” Citing a Conservative colleague Dorries said a woman alleged that she had been raped by an MP, but “no action was taken by the party”. Lots of people said I was mad to take him on … The country had become bogged down because of the failure to get Brexit done and I was going to need a mailed fist to help to get things done. Already we have heard about the scheming “Dr No”, a Government insider so brutish, that he once butchered a rabbit dear to a former partner in revenge.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. Her resignation paves the way for another potentially awkward byelection for the Conservatives in what should be an ultra-safe Tory seat. In 2019, Dorries won the seat with a 24,664 majority over Labour.

Haslam meant to show that the patient who discovered this conspiratorial plot was mad. Nadine Dorries means to show that Boris Johnson was deposed by plotters who had raised up and brought down his predecessors. Although she recognises it's actually pretty rough not having enough money, her portrayal of poverty as uniquely fostering compassion, generosity of spirit and the capacity for love as a superior alternative to actually being able to buy enough to eat is mostly so completely over the top that even she has to rein herself in and a paragraph pops up to remind us that it is also wretched.The portrait of her doing the rounds is one of a self-confessed “quite UKIP-y” fountain of bad takes. Such is her reputation for lamenting how “leftwing snowflakes” are dumbing down panto, and her former opposition to gay marriage, that one Tory MP reacted to the news of her appointment by telling the FT: “Nadine bleeding Dorries. Was whoever decided that on LSD at the time?”

Some of those ministers resigned in a flurry of exits that eventually downed Mr Johnson himself. Were those actions driven by malice? Or exasperation and despair with the leader himself? For me a good book is one that takes me to another place in which I am totally absorbed – ‘The Four Street’ did not do that for me. She writes: “He is paid by Central Office, has a pass to No 10 and, some say, Rishi Sunak doesn’t move without first seeking his advice. And yet people can spend years working in No 10 and never hear his name mentioned. Dorries has written about Irish people living in Liverpool after the Second World War, nurses working in a Liverpool hospital... after the Second World War, and even one about the 19th-century Irish famine.The author also takes aim at former chancellor Sajid Javid, the first to resign from the cabinet culminating in Johnson being toppled as PM. “Javid styled himself as ‘The Saj’, only God knows why.