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.
His perspective is that of a particular type of upwardly mobile Tory – the bright grammar school boy. Born in Lancashire to warring parents and raised in a ‘relentlessly horrible atmosphere’ (he describes witnessing his abused mother running at his father with a carving fork, shouting ‘Shitty hell’) through hard graft he became deputy head boy, chairman of Durham University Conservative Association, and MP for his home seat by the age of 29. His outlook is traditional, self-reliant, meritocratic; that of an all-round decent upright chap who, in 2007, banjanxed his front-bench career by resigning over David Cameron’s opposition to grammar schools.
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