No wonder dark forces in the Tory party threatened me over my book. It’s all coming true day by day

WHEN I published my book The Plot last November, I knew it would be explosive. But I never anticipated how ferocious the attacks that rained down on me would be.

The book made a number of predictions — and, one by one, these are coming to pass.

Chief among them was the suggestion that after Rishi Sunak had been installed as PM, it would be only a matter of time before ‘the plotters’ — a shadowy cabal within the party — turned against him, as they had turned against every Tory leader for the past two decades.

Sure enough, yesterday’s Mail reported claims that a group within the Conservative Party are now working to dethrone Rishi and install business secretary Kemi Badenoch as PM.

This group make for powerful enemies — as I know to my cost.

I understood that, having secured a reputable publisher in HarperCollins, I would have unnerved the plotters within the party. But I had no idea quite how much.

When I started writing, I quickly began to receive strange text messages from people who knew what they were like. They seemed like jokes — but they still spooked me. ‘Check your brakes,’ ‘Watch your back,’ ‘ Don’t walk past men carrying sharp umbrellas.’

Another indication that they were on to me came when I met a senior Conservative in the Mayfair private members’ club 5 Hertford Street — and he made a suggestion that rendered me speechless (a rare occurrence).

We were sitting in a secluded nook next to an open fireplace. After we had finished our off-the-record interview, he ordered us white wine, took a deep draught, and as he swirled his almostempty glass until the liquid became a vortex, he looked at me and asked: ‘ Why don’t you stop writing now?’

He checked that no one was listening. ‘ You could tell [ the plotters] what you know so far — and say you will stop writing if they guarantee they won’t play any funny games with your Lords nomination. You could even bag yourself a good public appointment: a big one.’

I laughed. He didn’t. His eyes remained locked on mine.

‘ Look, they have powerful contacts and will destroy your reputation. They’ve already decided how to respond to the book: They will block you from the Lords by devious means. Isn’t that more important to you?

‘Think of what that will mean to your granddaughter when you’re gone: “Baroness Nadine.” You deserve it.’

I’m not ashamed to say that I agreed with him. I regarded my nomination for the Lords as a huge honour. From working as a nurse in the NHS, I had begun my own business and sold it. I had served at the highest levels in political office after being in Westminster for 25 years — and, as an author,

I’d sold three million books.

‘No MP will thank you for the sacrifice if you carry on,’ my contact continued.

‘ You won’t change anything. Their plan has always been to burn the party down and, from the ashes, rebuild a new, modern, socially liberal one — and they won’t let you stop them. Defeat is what they are working for.’

He was nervous, and I could tell by the vein pulsing in his brow that his blood pressure was raised. ‘They will denounce you as a conspiracy theorist and a liar.

Michael Gove will damn you with faint praise and say you are an “excellent fiction writer”. The press briefings against you will be endless and they will hound you out of Westminster.’

He swallowed the last of his wine. I put my glass down. It tasted bitter. If what he was saying was true, it was even more important that I carry on.

Sure enough, two weeks later came the first letters from the Cabinet Office, demanding that I hand over a copy of my manuscript. These messages were relentless: first cajoling, then desperate, then angry.

I received my final one the very night before The Plot was serialised in this paper.

It made clear that my exile was complete: I would never be given a place in the Lords or any other public appointment.

By then, I had endured a yearlong campaign of negative press briefings from a secretive group determined to damage my reputation. My peerage was blocked — and all the things that my senior contact had warned me about by that open fire had come to pass.

But you know what? I don’t regret a thing.

So, you must be thinking who exactly are these people that wield such undemocratic control over the inner workings of the Tory party, making and breaking leaderships and pulling the levers of power?

Perhaps chief above all is the arch-manipulator, Gove himself — the man to whom all roads lead. Another key player is the ultrasecretive Dougie Smith, a onetime sex party organiser and longterm close friend of both Gove and Kemi Badenoch.

Last night, it emerged that Kemi and Gove are even in a WhatsApp group called Evil Plotters — an ironic nod to the book’s title.

Others plotters include: Dominic Cummings, the maverick operator with notoriously bad eyesight, brought into the party by Gove, and who worked with him since 2002; Robbie Gibb, brother of MP Nick Gibb; and Smith’s own wife, former No 10 Policy Unit Director Munira Mirza, who mentored Kemi throughout the last leadership hustings and wrote her speeches.

The first plotters began to flex their muscles as far back as 2002, when they attempted to have Norman Tebbit expelled from the party. They then successfully removed Iain Duncan Smith as leader in 2003, replacing him with caretaker leader Michael Howard.

Duncan Smith told me in detail about his removal for my book. Gove, he claimed, had urged him to lead the party into defeat, suggesting that it needed to be destroyed and rebuilt from scratch.

And even though David Cameron had once been the plotters’ pet, they engineered his resignation, too, after the Brexit vote in 2016.

When Boris became Prime Minister in 2019, Dougie Smith ordered him: ‘Put Kemi into the Cabinet and make her Education Secretary.’ Boris was incredulous. He didn’t know who Kemi was and wanted ministers who had experience running departments. He ignored the instruction.

Smith soon got his revenge. Six months before Boris left No 10, he told him: ‘Resign now and we may let you back one day.’

Boris didn’t do as he was told — and paid the price.

Rishi himself spent years as one of the plotters, impatiently — and successfully — manoeuvring to oust Boris in 2022. As a direct result of Boris’s departure, the

‘Stop writing and you’ll get that peerage’

They’ve set up a WhatsApp group called Evil Plotters — an ironic nod to the book’s title

Messages were desperate and then angry

Tories are now facing extinction as a party — which perhaps was the plotters’ intention all along.

Now Smith is believed to be orchestrating the plot against Rishi from a secret office in Covent Garden. He hasn’t been seen in No 10 since just before my book was published, but I have been told he’s still very much working behind the scenes.

And even though he’s diligently striving to remove a sitting Prime Minister, he’s still on the Tory party payroll — on a salary of more than £100,000, funded by party members’ subscriptions and donors.

So what needs to happen now? The truth is that MPs are the only people who can stop the plotters and save the party from this dangerous faction.

Needless to say, only one man has a mandate to be Prime Minister — and that is Boris. But they would never allow him back.

Tory MPs need to end the psychodrama, get behind Rishi and fight with every bone in their bodies to thwart the plotters and save the party from the eternal socialism that would follow a Labour landslide.

Despite their best intentions, trying to install Kemi Badenoch is not the answer. Another Tory leader — the fourth in just five years — would be the end.

The final words in the The Plot came from Boris himself: ‘I rather naively thought that, in this country, power flowed from the people into Westminster when electing a Prime Minister.’

So did we all. We were wrong. It’s time to take back control of the Tory party.