Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?

The great parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the Henry Lucy of our day, has described Sir Graham Brady (now Lord Brady) thus: ‘Were he a yacht, his galley would gleam, the decks would be scrubbed daily and there would be a large brass bell to summon matelots to morning parade. Commodore Brady runs a tight ship.’ After 27 years in the Commons, 14 of them as Chair of the 1922 Committee, the commodore has swapped his deck garb for ermine and written a kiss-and-tell about his political encounters with five Tory prime ministers.

The 1922 Committee – the fabled men in grey suits who represent the parliamentary party’s backbenchers – is ‘the closest thing the Conservative party has to its own trade union’. During Brady’s tenure it gained a degree of national fame, due to its rather too regular need to preside over the defenestration of Conservative leaders. Brady oversaw no fewer than four transitions (an all-time record), giving him a choice porthole onto a period of unique choppiness.