If anyone was in any doubt as to the role Sir Graham Brady sees himself as having played during his 14-year stint as chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, he has titled his memoir Kingmaker. The cover shows Brady, who is well over 6ft tall, towering before a gaggle of enrapt journalists, who are either kneeling down or just instinctively diminutive in his presence. The only thing at Brady’s lofty level is the Palace of Westminster – a visual hint as to how the author considers his standing.
In a way, he is right to. In normal political times, the 1922 chair does not command much recognition beyond the Westminster bubble. But normal political times don’t lead to five Conservative prime ministers within an eight-year period, only one of whom left office through the conventional route of losing an election. Throughout the Tory psychodrama of recent years, with leaders appointed at the whim of the MPs and party members, then ousted again when (as Boris Johnson so evocatively put it) “the herd moves”, the 1922 Committee has played a crucial role.
And Brady has himself become a main character in the drama – a point he illustrates by such anecdotes as being recognised by a party of Chinese tourists as he is trying to get into Downing Street via the back entrance to tell Liz Truss her time is up, or by immigration officials when arriving at Irish passport control just after the party installed Rishi Sunak as prime minister following those 49 days of chaos. “Being chairman of the 1922 Committee is meant to be a role that’s mostly performed in the shadows,” Brady writes in the introduction to Kingmaker. He goes on to explain how the events detailed in this book “made me unexpectedly famous, not just in this country but seemingly around the world, too”.
It should be an explosive exposé, not least because Brady kept so quiet during the periods of fevered speculation when it looked like Tory MPs were about to strike down whoever was their unfortunate leader at the time.
“The number of letters of ‘no confidence’ I had in my office safe was a regular preoccupation of the Conservative Party and the press throughout my tenure,” he notes, outlining the process through which MPs could vote to try to bring the prime minister down. Through his tenure, “I didn’t reveal how full or empty my office safe really was at key moments. And I largely avoided commenting publicly on what was happening behind the scenes in the Conservative Party. In other words, I was the model of discretion. Until now.”
A certain type of political junky lives for this kind of behind-the-scenes bombshell. But when Brady actually comes to unveil the secrets of his safe, the result is anti-climactic. From the winter of 2021 to the spring of 2022, for example, when the Owen Paterson scandal and partygate catalysed the drawn-out process of defenestrating Boris Johnson, Tory MPs were clearly getting progressively more restless, so it comes as no surprise to learn that letters began to trickle in. That one Conservative MP actually crossed the floor to Labour in disgust was a fairly significant clue that things were starting to go wrong.
Brady covers all this with nine whole pages of tallying exactly how many letters were being submitted and withdrawn, before the threshold of 54 needed to trigger a vote of no confidence is reached, which occurs over the Jubilee celebrations. At the time, rumours about the letters were regularly making the front pages. More than two years later, it just doesn’t have the same impact to know that on 14 April, just after Johnson had been given his fixed penalty notice by the Met for breaking lockdown rules, the number of letters stood at 37. The most entertaining passage from these pages is Brady’s account of being recognised once again, this time by a doctor immediately following a physical examination, to whom Brady quips: “A lot of people would pay good money to do what you just did.”
There is a similarly damp-squib feel to the details of when and how the committee considered changing its rules to enable a second vote of no confidence in Theresa May, the threat of which ultimately led to her resignation. Theresa May as prime minister? It all feels like ancient history.
Even more recent events lack the shock value Brady seems to think they will have. The start of 2024 was marked by breathless conjecture as to how close the pile was to triggering a confidence vote in Rishi Sunak’s leadership. Brady reminds us that the Telegraph was reporting “a flurry” of letters, while the fierce Sunak critic Simon Clarke briefed that there were “around 50 letters” in the safe. With a degree of barely concealed smugness, Brady reveals: “In fact, I had received nine.”
Since then, we’ve had an election that redrew parliament to an unrecognisable degree. If anyone is paying any attention to the Conservatives at all at the moment, their gaze is on the leadership contenders, not the previous PM. That Sunak was slightly safer from his MPs than the rumours suggested clearly caused Brady, as the Keeper of the Safe, much agitation and perhaps some glee. But does it really matter?
That is not to say Kingmaker is tedious to read. Brady has the zippy, carefree writing style of the recently retired (he stood down as an MP at the last election) as he skims over a quarter of a century of politics. He can at times be deliciously bitchy. “How many of these bizarre circumstances could have been imagined then?” he muses, casting his mind back to when he first entered Westminster in 1997. “A prime minister ‘ambushed by cake’, a special adviser driving the length of the country to ‘test his eyes’… Nadine Dorries serving in a cabinet.”
His recollections of his conversations with Boris Johnson are works of surreal comedic genius. (“Maybe it’s meant to finish us off,” the former PM ponders at once point. “You know, humans and farm animals are 96 per cent of the planet’s animal biomass! Perhaps this is our dinosaur moment! It wasn’t just an asteroid, you know.”) When Brady raises the subject of Dominic Cummings and his Barnard Castle story, pointing out that “no sane person would drive their wife and small child 30 miles to test his eyesight!”, Johnson’s response is to look perplexed and shout: “HE’S NOT SANE!” There are flashes of political insight, too, such as the observation that “all prime ministers go mad, and the measure of how good they are is the length of time it takes”.
But in letting fly the jibes and rejoinders he has held on to for so many years, Brady exposes more of himself than perhaps he realises. Amid the ups and down of the ill-fated leaders he works alongside, various leitmotifs emerge. There’s his fixation on grammar schools, for example which are mentioned over 60 times in the book and put him on a warpath with David Cameron and George Osborne (a throwaway comment from Osborne to David Miliband that Brady is “a grammar-school boy, you know” clearly still rankles two decades later). There’s his desire to relitigate the expenses scandal, defending his decision to charge a £1,850 sofa to the taxpayer, and his impassioned case for employing his wife in his parliamentary office during his time as an MP. And then there are the frequent references to the cabinet jobs he turns down from various prime ministers along the way, as well as the calls from colleagues for Brady to stand himself each time a leader is deposed and a new contest looms (“They argued that I could bring the party together”).
If one theme holds Kingmaker together, it is not, as the subtitle suggests, “Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers”. Rather, it is the truth about the uneasy tension between the Conservative parliamentary party and whoever happens to be leading it. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak all falter, in Brady’s eyes, because they fail to heed his advice when he takes the temperature of MPs and tries to relay his diagnosis to Downing Street. That they were perhaps trying to balance other considerations – such as the views of the wider electorate beyond the Conservative Party, or information the chairman of the 1922 Committee was not privy to – does not appear to cross his mind. Their downfalls could have been avoided, it is implied, had Cameron and May only listened to their backbenchers on Europe, had Johnson not ignored MPs’ concerns on vaccines and lockdown rules, or had Truss tried to work with her party rather than charging forth alone, leaving Sunak with a mess no leader could possibly clean up. The Conservatives, Kingmaker contends, might still have a prime minister in No 10 – if they’d paid just a bit more attention to Sir Graham Brady.
Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers
Graham Brady
Bonnier Books, 320pp, £25
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[See also: Inside Diane Abbott’s war with Labour]
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