Book review Lurid picture of wild wild Westminster

Does Nadine Dorries know, in Downfall, she's borrowing her title from a much-gifted film about the last days of Hitler?

- Zoe Williams

Does Nadine Dorries know, in Downfall, she's borrowing her title from a much-gifted film about the last days of Hitler? When the publishers' blurb on the back that this is an "astonishing real-life political thriller", do they mean its facts are as lurid as fiction, or are they trying to gloss the account as fiction to avert legal challenge? Why, in her anonymous, deep-throat encounters, do her sources tend to start by telling her how much they enjoyed her last book, The Plot?

This is nominally the story of Christmas 2023 to July 2024, and how the so-called "pasta plotters" tried to get rid of Rishi Sunak. There is no way on God's Earth you would ever get that from the narrative, which doubles back on itself so often, to praise and defend Boris Johnson and castigate his enemies, that you never have any idea where you are, chronologically, or what point Dorries is trying to land. It's like trying to map terrain by following a dog. You have to take that time period, and that subject matter, on trust from the author, and I just cannot stress strongly enough how much you shouldn't do that.

Dorries introduces herself from her writing desk: her snack (Christmas cake and stilton); her drink (tea); her domestic idyll (offspring, grandchild nearby). It's very like