The Four Streets: Volume 1

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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. Dorries claims Rishi resigned a day earlier than his actual resignation statement, and coordinated with Sajid Javid. “Rishi had already vacated his position as Chancellor the day before; he just hadn’t told anyone yet other than his own confidants,” she wrote.

The dreadful secret being kept by one of the girls in this story is that she is being sexually abused by her parish priest. While I know sexual exploitation by one's spiritual leaders did and still does occur, I can read all about in my own local newspaper. I don't want my leisure-time reading to be filled with that type of storyline, and I certainly don't want the description of said abuse to be graphic and prolonged, as it was in The Four Streets. Another source said: “It was later discovered that someone in the party secretly sent out regular cheques to the Priory Clinic to pay for the treatment of one of this man’s later victims, and still nobody spoke out … If action had been taken when that first rape was reported, those other women would have been saved from their life trauma.” 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.

Dorries names the key members of the movement as long-serving cabinet member Michael Gove, former adviser Dominic Cummings, and Dougie Smith, a seasoned insider and husband of Johnson’s former policy chief Munira Mirza. In the latest tedious round of the culture war, I did not expect to be taking a position on the books of the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, whose defenders point to her being a prolific novelist as evidence of a sincere interest in the arts. Instantly, we are pitched into a world of literature “that people actually want to read”, defined against all those who think novels should be about feelings and Kierkegaard and preferably only understood by a coterie of four critics. Does anyone who likes books really think like this? It could be the naming of characters after Bond villains – the mysterious unelected Conservative fixer about whom she has collected so many spectacularly libellous-sounding stories that he cannot be named is dubbed “Dr No”. Or even the way Dorries, a woman far sharper than critics suggest, casts herself for narrative purposes as a political ingenue, roaming Westminster asking impossibly wide-eyed questions as she tries to establish who killed Boris Johnson’s career. Eventually, our amateur sleuth discovers it’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account! Just kidding: apparently it’s a sinister cabal called “the movement” comprising Cummings, Michael Gove, spin doctor turned BBC executive Robbie Gibb and various lesser-known apparatchiks who have “set out to control the destiny of the Conservative party” for 25 years. And that’s where the story falls apart. The interviews with Johnson himself that punctuate the book are genuinely intriguing, and not just for Dorries’s ability to somehow capture him sounding more thoughtful and statesmanlike than any previous interviewer. They’re interspersed with long, dramatic conversations between Dorries and various unnamed sources who all seemingly share her thesis, several of whom have a habit of speaking like characters in a bad spy novel. The one codenamed Moneypenny, who she hints could be a spook, fascinated me. Over the years, I’ve admittedly met only a handful of MI5 or MI6 types, but none said things like “for the first time ever, there is a man waiting in the wings who is connected to the money network of the world, and of course they hate it when the plan doesn’t go to plan”. You long for a proper explanation of how Johnson managed to hire so many people who hated him, or even why they hated him so much if he really was the man Dorries describes. Instead, we get Moneypenny’s analysis that Johnson never realised what the plotters were doing because “it’s the big picture for him, always … he was obsessed about delivering on his manifesto promises”, which suggests she isn’t destined for a long intelligence career.

That was the threshold – 15 per cent of the Conservative parliamentary party – which was needed to trigger a vote of no confidence. That vote was indeed triggered, in June 2022. You might know her as the former culture secretary who loves nothing more than a confrontational broadcast interview and isn't much a fan of the BBC. The first problem is the time frame, it's not clear how long of a time period this book is supposed to cover. There is a 2 year time period from the point where we are introduced to Alice's character and when her role in the story really starts. But then that's followed by a mention of the child being in nappies to jumping to mentions of school. There is no clear indication of the differences in ages between Kitty and Nellie, but it's mentioned near the end that Kitty is 14 and they appear to both be caring for the other kids. There are no mentions of any big events like birthdays or Christmas to help explain. I’m frustrated. I’m seething. I’m a caged beast. I’m a coiled mamba … We’re drifting; we are losing the plot.”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. 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. You have no mandate from the people, and the government is adrift. You have squandered the goodwill of the nation, for what?”