The Four Streets: Volume 1

Product Information

When I chose this book to read I was oblivious to the fact it is written by Nadine Dorries, an MP known for taking part in some reality show I never watch, which was just as well as I was not influenced by the authors previous fame and did genuinely find the book engaging. The setting was well described and the hardships palpable. Dorries creates characters you learn to love and hate. The tragedy, laughter, spirit of community and religion are well depicted throughout the novel. Dorries, who controversially appeared as a contestant on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, has said that she manages to fit in writing with her job as an MP because "my youngest child left home for university and I was left with an empty nest. I replaced ironing, shopping, cleaning and chauffeuring, with writing."

Although she recognises it's actually pretty rough not having enough money, her portrayal of poverty as uniquely fostering compassion, generosity of spirit and the capacity for love as a superior alternative to actually being able to buy enough to eat is mostly so completely over the top that even she has to rein herself in and a paragraph pops up to remind us that it is also wretched.But Nadine Dorries is also a published author who has written more than a dozen novels since 2014 and has sold more than 2.5 million copies, according to Head of Zeus, her publisher. She writes: “He is paid by Central Office, has a pass to No 10 and, some say, Rishi Sunak doesn’t move without first seeking his advice. And yet people can spend years working in No 10 and never hear his name mentioned. Not that Dorries pretends it's fun to be poor. Poor people are just good at getting on with it, particularly in this little Utopia. Here the values of rural Irish communities, where whole families can live for a week on a pan of boiled nettles and a hen's foot, are transposed into mean streets of two-up, two-downs with an outhouse in the yard and Granada TV on the sideboard. In this tight little world, it's outsiders who spell trouble, unless they're Irish outsiders, when what matters is that they are Irish. Boris told Dorries: “We should have moved on from him much, much earlier… We needed a strong team and Vote Leave had been a winning team. It was always a bit odd though how Lee Cain and many of the people working in No. 10 always referred to Cummings as ‘the Dark Lord’. I could never get my head around that one. Quite odd.

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 bad people are the ones who are incapable of love and who are English. They are predators on the poor, and to Dorries the bad thing about being poor is vulnerability. 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.”Some of those ministers resigned in a flurry of exits that eventually downed Mr Johnson himself. Were those actions driven by malice? Or exasperation and despair with the leader himself? So bits of Dorries’s book might be hilariously mad, bits of it might be unproven, and bits of it might be horribly true. Arguably, the mere existence of The Plot – by someone who was a cabinet minister until relatively recently – is but one indication that the government and the wider political culture are very much on fire. Also arguably, the muted reaction to The Plot is a symptom of the past few years in that particular political culture, which might reasonably have left people thinking of their country as the sort of place where these gothically grotesque things probably do happen, increasingly to the point of being unremarkable. So does that mean that Nadine’s dead cat is alive, or dead on arrival? Without resorting to that other beloved metaphor for British political coverage, I can’t help feeling it can be both. The author also takes aim at former chancellor Sajid Javid, the first to resign from the cabinet culminating in Johnson being toppled as PM. “Javid styled himself as ‘The Saj’, only God knows why.