Who is Dr No?
Part Three of Nadine Dorries and the Plot Against Britain
The story
So far: Nadine has met herself in a pub and sent herself on a quest to discover the truth about why the charismatic and popular Boris Johnson was really brought down; the commonly believed version – Partygate, lying etc - making no sense at all to her or anyone else she talks to.
This adventure takes her from meeting to meeting with unnamed sources in a private room in a Mayfair club, to meeting after meeting with Boris Johnson in his office and his country home and once to Iain Duncan Smith’s office for an hour with the ousted Tory leader. Everywhere the story is the same. There is a secretive cabal which everyone knows about which has been manipulating events and people in the Conservative party for the best part of 20 years. Apparently led by Michael Gove this group was behind the fall of Duncan Smith in 2004 and Boris in 2022.
But is Gove their real leader and what on earth is their real objective?
Dorries is taking her time, but on this Substack we must hurry. However…
A stylistic digression
I came into journalism as a researcher on a TV current affairs programme. Every now and again we would need to film one of our interviewees just doing something - anything - so we could add some commentary or a description to the interview. We wouldn't have long to shoot what were called “establishing shots” so usually they would consist of someone just walking along the road or making a cup of tea. You have seen these shots a million times. It was very boring to do.
So in her next secret and lengthy Mayfair encounter with an anonymous No 10 source Dorries needs to lace some very long bits of narrative with a series of verbal “establishers”. Women, with their more elaborate costume (“she fiddled nervously with her necklace”) offer more possibilities. Men frankly defeat Dorries. So the rendezvous is punctuated in this way:
The coffees arrived
yadayadayada
He smiled wistfully at his coffee cup
blahblahblah
He looked down into his coffee
Cummingsgove. Govecummings
I ordered more coffees
Govegovegovegove
My source spooned sugar into his coffee
Domdomdomdom
He nursed his cup between two hands
Finally
I had to usher him out so that he didn’t bump into the next person….New coffees ordered , I got straight to the point.
By now Dorries must be on the Everest of caffeine highs.
The new coffee drinker is a “pass holder” and tells her that in Boris’s No 10:
“There seemed to be two power bases, which fought each other and then came together again. Power base number one was Dom, Lee, Cleo and Gove and all the Vote Leave crew, and power base two was Munira and Dougie, the shadowy Dr No with Robbie Gibb as an appendage and a few of the policy spads.”
Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me. This is a conspiracy as wide as it is deep.