NADINE DORRIES: Inside story of how Sue Gray took down Boris Johnson

Eight months ago, former Conservative MP Nadine Dorries detonated a time bomb in the world of politics with the publication of her book The Plot: The Shocking Inside Story Of Who Really Runs Britain.

From deep-throat interviews with 50 individuals close to the seat of power, she compiled a shocking story of how the Movement, a small group of men, most of them unelected and some totally unknown outside a tight Westminster bubble, has been operating at the heart of the Conservative Party over the past 25 years and controlling its destiny.

She named the key players as Michael Gove, former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings and Tory party official Dougie Smith, plus a sinister individual, called ‘Dr No’ for legal reasons, who wields particular influence.

She accused them of bringing down Iain Duncan Smith as party leader, creating havoc for Theresa May, undermining Liz Truss — and, most heinous of all, the political assassination of Boris Johnson, ousted from Downing Street despite being a sitting prime minister with an 80-seat majority.

In the paperback version of The Plot — due out on election day, July 4 — she reveals more shocking allegations of mischief and misbehaviour at the very top of our political system, beginning with the inside story of the senior civil servant whose actions dented her supposed impartiality.

If any proof were needed that Boris Johnson was the victim of a stitch-up, it was the astonishing news that Sue Gray — the supposedly impartial senior civil ­servant and Partygate inquisitor whose report into lockdown activities at No 10 had pointed an accusatory finger at him — was to become the Labour Party’s chief of staff, appointed by its leader, Sir Keir Starmer.

Her own party affiliation was revealed — not just a Labour apparatchik, but taking up the most powerful position in the party having come straight from the heart of the administration under the Conservative Government.

One moment she was being trusted to investigate, faithfully and impartially, allegations that were potentially highly damaging to the Tory Government. The next, she was Chief of Staff to the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. Something was very wrong.

The announcement of her new position meant that for the first time, the scales fell from the eyes of that gathering herd of Conservative MPs who had ganged up on Boris and forced him to resign.

Blinking in the daylight, they now said to each other, ‘How did that happen? She’s a senior civil servant who is supposed to be wholly impartial, but now she is in cahoots with Labour. Have we been had?’

The answer is yes. The anti-Boris media and the Remain establishment were determined to use ­Partygate to get him out, but it was her report that provided the pretext — the vehicle the plotters against Boris needed for the final blow to bring him down.

Since The Plot was first published, I have discovered just how that worked up close. It is, I can reveal to you, an extraordinary story.

The fact is that from the moment she was commissioned to investigate so-called parties in Downing Street, she was in an immensely powerful position. Since 2017 she had had a reputation as the ‘woman who runs the country’ because of her role in the Cabinet Office as director general of the propriety and ethics team. She reported directly to the Cabinet Secretary and had a wide-ranging remit over the operation of ministerial offices, public appointments and government ethics.

Now, in deciding what really went on in Downing Street, she knew that Parliament — and the public — were going to have to rely on her word alone.

For anyone who wanted to notice, the signs of where her political sympathies lay had long been there. Her chief legal adviser was a Remain-backing Labour QC who repeatedly tweeted that Boris should be removed. Her PR, a former special adviser to Michael Gove, had tweeted anti-Boris comments day after day.

She was also a close friend of Michael Gove, who stood against Boris for the party leadership in what was deemed an act of betrayal. (She had controversially advised Gove in 2011 that conducting government business via his private email would make such emails exempt from freedom of information requests. It was absurd advice, which was investigated following complaints by the information commissioner and overturned.)

Gray has always denied she had a secret agenda to ­topple Boris. But the ­circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. First, she lulled him into a false sense of security — just as she told all witnesses who contributed to the Gray report, wrongly, as it turned out, that they would not face any penalty as a result of what they said or the information they gave her.

Time after time, she came to see Boris to inform him about the progress of her inquiry. She repeatedly told him she did not think there was anything to justify police involvement. She stressed that she had found absolutely no evidence or heard any testimony that suggested Boris knew about any rule-breaking.

She gave the firm impression, in fact, that she thought it was all a fuss about nothing.

However, on their second meeting, she said suddenly: ‘Once this is all over, I hope you will make me permanent secretary in the Northern Ireland office, Prime Minister.’ Unclear what was happening, an amazed Boris thought he was being offered a fudge — and pretended he had not heard.

It was only later he discovered that Gray — the daughter of Irish parents and with a known affection for the region, having even run a pub in the border town of Newry on a career break from the Civil Service in the 1980s — had been turned down for the job. She was possibly blocked by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, which one can assume is where her renowned dislike of Case began.

After this meeting with Boris, things turned nasty and her report eventually declared that she had heard about events in Downing Street that really should not have taken place. None of which, of course, were known to Boris.

In the transcripts of her interviews she can be seen asking witnesses if the PM had any knowledge of gatherings, even when the question seems totally irrelevant, as though trying to drag Boris in. The witnesses always said: ‘No.’

It cannot be stated often enough that Boris was as surprised as everyone else to learn that so-called parties had taken place in No 10 when he had left Downing Street for his official country residence, Chequers.

Rather than Boris, it was the job of Case and Helen MacNamara, the deputy cabinet secretary at the time, to ensure that officials working in No 10 behaved well. They may not have known exactly what was going on in the dozens of meeting rooms where officials were working round the clock against Covid, but neither did Boris.

Yet Case was not fined for being at the so-called birthday party in June 2020 for which Boris was fined. But, of course, Case was never the target. That was always Boris.

As for Sue Gray, as second permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, she was wandering the same corridors of power. She was in charge of monitoring the conduct of the entire building — ministers, advisers and civil servants. Was she aware of rule-breaking at the time? She says no, and neither was Boris.

What’s more, though a government ethics tsar, she had never been hostile to the occasional workplace relaxation, as can be seen in photographs of her using the very karaoke machine she later complained about in her report. Boris had no idea of the machine’s existence.

Given what we now know, it is not surprising that much of Gray’s report has crumbled under ­scrutiny. From mountains of ­testimony — much of it unsubstantiated gossip — she cherry-picked details that she knew would enrage MPs and voters.

She reported three claims in particular: that a female adviser at No 10 had vomited; that there had been fisticuffs between a pair of male advisers; and that there had been an incident of rudeness to staff. None of these allegations had been put to the individuals concerned, and none could be substantiated.

In the case of the vomiting female, the woman had been ill, not drunk, and Gray begrudgingly struck it out. But by then it was too late — the Government had been badly damaged from within, and Labour’s purpose served.

At some stage, Gray began talks with the Labour Party about a job with the kind of power she ­evidently craved. She had been blocked from the job she wanted in the Northern Ireland office. Did she suddenly see the possibility of a deal with Labour — and if so, when?

A source in the know told me: ‘Sue Gray was holding transition talks with Labour for a long time before she left the Civil Service. They were authorised by Michael Gove. Boris was completely unaware they were taking place.’ But timing is not really the issue. What is extraordinary is that she should at one moment be posing as an impartial civil servant and the next be revealed as a passionate Labour Party supporter.

After the publication of The Plot last November, I found myself being abused and discredited. ‘I’m being called a conspiracy theorist,’ I said to ­’Moneypenny’ — the high-level source of inside material I’d met in great secrecy and codenamed after M’s secretary in the James Bond novels — when she called me about it.

‘Lots of journalists are mocking the notion of the Movement,’ I told her. ‘Dominic Cummings has been chipping in on Twitter, like it never existed and was something I’ve made up.’

Gove damned it (and me) with faint praise, saying I was an excellent author of fiction — which I am. A very successful writer, I have 3million sales from 17 novels to my name.

But The Plot was wholly factual. I was confident that everything I’d written in the book could be backed-up. I knew that to my cost, as my agent and my publisher’s lawyers were ruthless about making sure.

And now Moneypenny had a jaw-dropping extra piece of ­information for me, which I ­desperately wished she’d told me earlier because it signalled that what I had written was no fantasy of mine but rooted in ­historical fact.

Here was evidence that the Movement’s manipulation of the Tory party went back nearly a quarter of a century, when this cabal of disrupters tried to destroy Norman Tebbit, one of the legendary Conservative figures under Mrs Thatcher. He had been seriously injured in the IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, and his wife permanently disabled.

Moneypenny recalled a diary piece Tebbit had written for The Spectator in 2002 in which he claimed moves were being made to throw him out of the party ‘for being white, male, heterosexual and old’.

Tebbit, it transpired, had once, as party chairman, tried to shut down the Federation of Conservative Students — which had been the starting point for the Movement and included Gove, Cummings and Smith amongst its ranks and associates. The FCS resembled a group of anarchists by arguing for the total liberalisation of drug laws, incest and paedophilia.

Tebbit had written in his ­Spectator article: ‘A bunch of weirdos, some in high office in the party, have been planning a confrontation [with me] to demonstrate that the Conservative Party has embraced cool Britannia, youth, the gay world and ethnic minorities and rejected Thatcherism, tax cuts, families, and tradition.’ Then in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph, he wrote that ‘individuals within Central Office, MPs and three leading journalists have coalesced into one organisation styled ‘the Movement’.

Other newspaper reports from the time also referred to ‘the Movement’ — this grouping we were now being asked to believe was just a fantasy created in my little head.

I told Moneypenny: ‘Cummings and journalists who present themselves as serious and ­established have been out there ridiculing the very notion of the Movement, whereas all along they knew full well it was a factual thing.’

It didn’t take a genius to work out that Gove, who was working at The Times until 2005, was one of the journalists Tebbit was referring to. To my mind, Gove is the glue which binds the Cummingses, the Smiths, the whole Movement cabal together in their actions to create disharmony, disruption and damage the Conservative Party. They depend on a high level of political churn at the top of the party in order to wipe clean any historical memory of their behaviour and actions.

As stated in The Plot, in a televised interview with Laura Kuenssberg, Cummings admitted it had been their intention to remove Boris from power within days of him having won his extraordinary, once-in-a-generation victory in the 2019 General Election, with the biggest Conservative majority in 40 years and a larger percentage of the vote than Tony Blair secured for the Labour landslide in 1997.

Long before he first placed his foot across the No 10 threshold as prime minister — with a mandate in his own right — the plot was afoot to remove him. When it succeeded and he stepped down, I remember a young Tory MP saying to me in despair: ‘What the f*** have we done?’

He was close to tears. He knew it, the world knew it. The ­Conservative Party had gone quite mad and appeared to be in the middle of a collective nervous breakdown.

Has Gove’s 22-year quest to burn the party to the ground finally come to fruition? I fear he may have succeeded, and the cost to us all is immeasurable. He thought if he stabbed Boris in the back, MPs would flood to him and back him as leader; instead Theresa May became prime minister by default.

Gove’s political cack-handedness gave us a zombie parliament and very nearly, at the 2017 election, Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister. By no stretch of the imagination was that clever.

From the outset, the media trashed my book. The reviews were mostly as bad as they could possibly be and they kept

coming. The Times ran nine ­articles attacking me in just ten days, including not one but two ‘reviews’ which read like hit jobs.

And it wasn’t just The Times. The client relationship that so many senior journalists have with political briefers meant that I was getting it from all sides.

On the day the book was ­published, during an interview on the BBC‘s Today programme, Nick Robinson commented that he had actually seen the gold wallpaper in No 10. This was a reference to the gleefully told story that an extravagant Boris and wife Carrie had splurged thousands of pounds on gold wallpaper for the prime minister’s flat in Downing Street.

But Robinson couldn’t possibly have seen it because it never existed. Incredulous, I tried to respond and ask him where, but my microphone had been cut off. He called me straight after the interview and admitted that he hadn’t actually seen any gold wallpaper at all. Robinson just thought that the red-painted wall he had seen in No 10 looked like some expensive wallpaper.

No matter how hard those accused in the book and others tried to damn it, they couldn’t stop people buying it. Or the fact that, one by one, specific predictions in The Plot, and the fact that the Tory party had shot itself in the foot by ousting Boris and was on a dramatic downward spiral under Rishi Sunak, were coming to pass.

By-election results sent the message straight from the doorsteps of voters into No 10. Those people who had voted for Boris to be prime minister were about to punish MPs for not doing more to support him.

As the polls continued to nose-dive and reality set in, people in the party were ­starting to realise that Rishi wasn’t the answer to a question few of them had ever really understood. I remember how many of the young and new MPs in the 2019 intake who voted to remove him would tell me they’d done so because Brexit was done.

‘That’s what got Boris elected,’ they would say. ‘There’s no big idea to vote for now, is there?’ I was appalled by their naivety. ‘Who is it you want in his place, then?’ I would ask, and was invariably answered with a shrug of the shoulders.

They got Liz Truss, then Rishi, and the self-satisfied smiles disappeared from the faces of those MPs who had plotted against Boris, to be replaced with a rictus grin as a grim mood gripped the party in Westminster.

All those MPs who argued that Rishi would grow into the job were now having to admit it has been like watching a lump of sugar slowly dissolve in a warm drink.

Panic set in as they grasped that the deed was done, that nothing they could do or say would change anything in the minds of party members or the voting public. No policy, no clever announcements.

The desperately bad local election results in May 2023 (and 2024) and the by-election results had not been a blip. Tory MPs were on political death row. The result in my old constituency of Mid Bedfordshire was the biggest by-election loss in history. On the doorstep, it was Boris that people were asking for. They were angry he had been removed.

It was a painful irony that the only seat the Conservatives won was Uxbridge, Boris’s old seat.

Throughout the toppling of Boris, Rishi’s team insisted they were keeping their distance from Dominic Cummings, the most ­visible architect of Boris’s downfall. Yet I have learnt that despite all of his denials, Rishi was still talking to Cummings.

In July 2023, they had a secret meeting at Rishi’s Yorkshire home, where he had just installed a swimming pool. But it was the diminutive former banker who was out of his depth as he begged Cummings to come to his rescue and reverse his sinking fortunes.

Over dinner, he contemplated bringing Cummings back into the centre at No 10.

It was an absurd plea, since it was the Mekon-like Cummings whose machinations had helped to bring the party to its knees.

Cummings, never known for owning his mistakes, proved reluctant to come to Rishi’s rescue. One can only imagine how self-satisfied he felt, like a cat toying with a mouse.

Cummings had left his mark on Rishi, who was now keen to show Cummings he was listening to him, in order to keep him on-side. But as every party leader before Rishi could attest, that was an impossible task.

Client journalists reported that there had been no conclusions reached at the meetings. None of Cummings’s demands met. Yet, this was surely not the case. The tete-a-tete between Rishi and Cummings resulted in the announcement of a plan to ensure the teaching of maths in schools up to the age of 18.

This was a long-standing obsession of Cummings which he had written about in the past, and to follow that, Rishi delivered yet another long-standing demand of his and scrapped the northern leg of HS2.

In desperation the party then turned to William Hague — a former party leader and an avid promoter of Rishi who had argued in ­broadcast interviews and in his column that Boris should be replaced by Rishi — to lure him back into ­government. Hague declined the offer, but suggested David Cameron instead, who was appointed Foreign Secretary.

Photographs and footage of ­Cameron and Rishi together made for painful comparisons. Rishi, weedy and insubstantial, trousers too short, with a fixed grin and gleaming teeth, stood next to the self-assured former prime minister, who appeared as though he had never left.

I gave interviews based on the theory that Cameron was the fall-back, a leader from the House of Lords who could be popped in if Rishi was removed, or if the party was wiped out in a general election.

Right on cue, Dominic Cummings tweeted that there should be odds on Rishi flying off to California and Cameron being installed as prime minister. It was just weeks since Cummings had been swimming in Rishi’s pool in Yorkshire.

Hague’s contribution was to pen an article for The Times — ‘Beware of Boris the incredible sulk’ — as he warned that Boris continued to be a nightmare for No 10. Boris, meanwhile, was keeping a low profile and had barely spoken to the media.

The Sunak squad are terrified that Boris will try to get a seat and are doing everything possible to ensure that doesn’t happen, including letting it be known that if he tries for a seat, he will be blocked.

This amuses me. Boris won’t come back. Why would he destroy his own unbroken record of winning big for the Conservatives? Why would he want to be associated with their catastrophic mess and failure?

Boris will be keeping well away, if he has any sense. If MPs need his help when out campaigning, then Rishi needs to pick up the phone and ask him. I’m not even sure the answer would be yes.

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