"The Plot" by Nadine Dorries - A Review

I understand why Nadine Dorries’ book “The Plot”, an account of the machinations that removed two UK Prime Ministers from office without recourse to the electorate, should have received a poor overall average rating from reviewers.

We all think we know what happened to Boris Johnson. We think we know what happened to Liz Truss.

Many wanted to believe that Johnson was a liar who believed in one rule for others and another for himself, because they opposed his policy on Brexit and wanted to believe that made him a bad man. The mainstream media certainly made sure that every last ounce of bad publicity was squeezed out of Partygate.

Many believe that Truss crashed the economy, because the media told us so. That she contrived to do this while UK economic growth was topping the G7 in two out of three post-Brexit years can be quietly brushed under the carpet. The left assured us that the economy had been crashed and, unlike the right, they never lie.

So a book aiming to set the record straight is immediately faced with a wall of opposition from powerful people and from general perception. It’s surprising, in the circumstances, that it should make it into print at all.

Then, naturally, it will be read by a lot of people determined to pick holes in it, as well as downvoted by people who haven’t even read it. I mean, who wants to be told that they have been played for fools and that our cherished democracy can be twisted to achieve personal ends, no matter what the public wants?

I cannot claim an open mind. I always suspected that Johnson was brought down by Remainer desire for revenge on the man who personified Brexit. I couldn’t quite work out how they had done it, or how quite so many turkey-like Conservative MPs had been persuaded to vote for Christmas.

I did always think that the Partygate fuss was blown way out of proportion when Currygate was a more serious case of the same sort, and largely ignored. I never expected The Privileges Committee investigation to be unbiased, and was unsurprised when it wasn’t. What I didn’t grasp was that the media would swallow wholesale the nonsense being leaked from Downing Street, or that the leaks themselves were part of an orchestrated programme and not merely random.

“The Plot” makes no pretence of impartiality. Nadine was part of Team Boris, and proud of it. But she was a cabinet minister and in a position to know a great deal more than the average reader, as well as to see the frantic paddling beneath the surface that marked the apparently serene progress of the swan of state.

I found this book an enthralling read. For me, it supplied the missing pieces in a puzzle I couldn’t quite solve.

No doubt others will dismiss it as just another conspiracy theory. And we all know that nine out of ten alleged conspiracies are really just SNAFUs.

On the other hand. We do have to remember that the tenth one really is a conspiracy. And it suits the interests of conspirators if everyone believes that the tenth was just a SNAFU, too.

Book Review: 'Adults in the Room' by Yanis Varoufakis

Some critics of Varoufakis are clearly unreasonable. He did not create the Greek debt crisis of 2015; he inherited it.

A so-called bailout programme which actually reduces the national income of the debtor economy, rendering it even less able to pay than it was before, is demonstrably unsustainable. Kicking the can down the road, by what is called ‘extend and pretend’, protects badly-managed international banks at the expense of ill-advised Greek citizens and their livelihoods.

A Greek default would have led to the country’s ejection from the Eurozone and who knows how much damage to the EU project.

We need to remember that the single currency’s advantage over earlier programmes such as The Snake and The EMS was supposed to be its irrevocable nature. If Greece could be forced out, what would prevent the next victim of the single currency’s poor design being forced out too? Was it reasonable to expect Greece to take one for the team? I hardly think so.

The Lesson of ‘Adults in the Room’ is essentially an old and simple one: When you are in a hole, stop digging. But that advice is sadly oversimplified. You find that others in the same hole won’t, for a variety of reasons, stop digging. What’s worse, the owners of another, much bigger hole, see digging you further in as a wonderful means of digging themselves out.

Though his short career as Greek Finance Minister may have appeared Quixotic, the sad truth is that Varoufakis was tilting at real giants, not windmills. As is all too common with giants, many of these were not all that nice, and there were simply too many of them out there.

I recommend ‘Adults in the Room’ not just to critics of the EU, but to anyone tempted to overdose on a Public-Relations-based idealisation of a deeply-flawed organization.

*****

(5 Stars)