The political analysis in The Plot has more puppetry than Tracy Island. Oliver Dowden (whom Nadine Dorries succeeded as Culture Secretary) is a “puppet” of Mr Smith. Lee Cain (the Downing Street director of communications) was “a total puppet” of Mr Cummings. Rishi Sunak was “their dream puppet”. But a question occurred to her about Michael Gove and the conspirators: “Is he their puppet or a puppeteer?” Or you might know her as the one-time contestant on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, who chowed down on baked spiders and camel toes in the Australian jungle, as you do. Secrecy, fear and the cloak of anonymity have protected those who wield power in the shadows, until now. It makes The House of Cards appear tame, but this is no made-up tale, it’s for real and, for the first time, their political dark arts are about to be revealed.”

And her novels do have a dedicated fanbase. Later work Velvet Ribbon did well on Goodreads. One reviewer said it was one of the best novels they have read. Take that, Telegraph snob Christopher Howse. But then again, this is Goodreads, where I’ve never given a book below a three-star rating. Related stories recommended by this writer: Dorries’ source said: “An MP gave a young female a date rape drug; the next thing she knew was she woke in a country hotel the following morning. He wanted her out of the room because, he told her, he had visitors coming for breakfast.” Those victims of abuse and paedophilia at the hands of the Catholic Church deserve redress and proper recognition but this novel insults their suffering rather than presenting their case in a sympathetic manner. 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.

Dorries was signed up as an author in 2013 in a six-figure deal, shortly before she was forced to apologise to MPs for failing to declare her fee for appearing on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! She has since written the Four Streets series, set in a “tight-knit Irish Catholic community” in 1950s Liverpool where the villain is an abusive Catholic priest; the Lovely Lane series, in which “five very different girls are arriving at the nurses’ home in Lovely Lane, Liverpool, to start their training” in 1950s Liverpool; and the Tarabeg series, which moves between a small village on the west coast of Ireland, and Liverpool. He spectacularly failed to impress at the Cabinet table. He never shone in any department and was now running on air… monotone, startlingly unimaginative.” Her resignation paves the way for another potentially awkward byelection for the Conservatives in what should be an ultra-safe Tory seat. In 2019, Dorries won the seat with a 24,664 majority over Labour.

Clogs and shawls queen … the new secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA Anyway, by way of welcome byproducts, it would be nice to think that Nadine’s failure to burn down the whole Conservative government with her book would lead to the permanent demise of the phrase “dead cat”. This expression first made meaningful landfall with the political chatterati during the 2015 general election, when the Australian strategist Lynton Crosby was running David Cameron’s campaign, and had served up some distracting nastiness about the Miliband brothers and Trident. Isabel Hardman in the Spectator glossed it by explaining Crosby’s view that if you threw something disgusting on the metaphorical dining room table, everyone would deplore you but they’d be talking about that rather than the thing that was causing you real grief. Alas, through absolutely no fault of Isabel’s own, a deceased feline monster was born. Ever since, the phrase “dead cat” has served as the default explanation for armchair campaign strategists seeking to explain why anything from a scandal to a war is actually just a “dead cat” to distract the sheeple from the real story.

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. On the simplest of fronts, there was a “plot” to bring down Mr Johnson in the sense that Tory MPs did undeniably move to force him from office before the next general election. On the positive side: the book's cover is really sweet. Also, Ms. Dorries' writing style is easy and non-pretentious, though mostly narrative, with minimal dialogue. The story grabbed me immediately, and I couldn't put the book down...

I claim no Parliamentary expenses and use my outside earnings from writing to subsidise my public role as an MP," Dorries has said. "I discovered writing very late and as a result I would encourage anyone, even people who claim not to be creative, to try and find a creative hobby. You never know where it may lead. For me, it led to a deep contentment and happiness that has helped me to fulfil so many other roles in my life and, without doubt, I am a better MP as a result of the enjoyment I derive from writing in my spare time." The Johnson ally also has a problem with the defence secretary. “Grant’s overly voluble Cabinet contributions always created an eye roll from colleagues,” she writes.HarperCollins has described Dorries’ book as a “seismic, fly-on-the-wall account of how the saviour of the Conservative party became a pariah” and will feature “unparalleled access, from multiple inside sources talking with astonishing candour”. Labour MP Dawn Butler has questioned how Dorries has time to write so many books as an MP while others have cheered her on. 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?