‘Remember you are mortal’ was the phrase whispered by particular slaves in ancient Rome in a chariot to a commander as crowds cheered. The Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the shop steward of Conservative backbenchers, has a similar role in meetings with the Conservative Party leader. Graham Brady (now upgraded to Lord Brady of Altrincham) held the role from 2010 until this year, thus proving rather less mortal than the Prime Ministers who would come and go during that time.
Part of his role was to maintain complete discretion. He wouldn’t even tell his wife how many letters had been sent in at any given time seeking to trigger a no-confidence vote in the Party leader. What a release it must have been for him to write his highly indiscreet memoirs – ‘Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers’. It is not published until next week but has been serialised in The Daily Telegraph.
Despite his powerful status, not all Conservative leaders were that keen to listen to his warnings. For instance, Brady writes:
My relationship with Cameron remained cordial but was never close. He was assiduous in making time for regular meetings, at least recognising that it would look bad if I was asked by the media when we had last spoken and I couldn’t answer. Typically, he would kick off his shoes and put his feet up on the coffee table with his hands behind his head and spend 20 or 30 minutes hearing my observations. I always suspected that he wasn’t that interested, but found it a welcome period of calm in the middle of a busy day.
On other occasions, a PM might come out with a vigorous response. For example, Brady went to see Boris Johnson to convey dismay at the behaviour of Dominic Cummings during lockdown. Johnson insisted he believed Cummings. Brady retorted: ‘The Barnard Castle story is obvious bulls***: no sane person would drive their wife and small child 30 miles to test his eyesight!’ Johnson hit back: ‘He’s not sane!’
Not the best defence, is it? It reminds me of the Fawlty Towers episode when a customer complains to Basil Fawlty about Manuel the waiter. Fawlty replies: ‘You think I don’t know? You only have to eat here. We have to live with it. I had to pay his fare all the way from Barcelona, but you can’t get the staff, you see. It’s a nightmare.’
The Chief Whip is also tasked with keeping the Party Leader informed, of course. But that role is more taken up with the daily grind of Parliamentary business. They also have the job of trying to quash dissent. Brady would often be among the dissenting voices himself – such as on the European Union, during the Cameron era, then on lockdown under Johnson.
Even before the Conservatives came into government, he had resigned as an opposition spokesman in a dispute over grammar schools. This episode is long forgotten, but it gives an understanding of Brady and of later Conservative tensions. David Willetts, then the shadow education secretary, had attacked grammar schools. But Brady argued that the evidence from his constituency in Trafford was not just that the grammar schools achieved excellent results, but that the high schools did better than comprehensives elsewhere.
Willetts hit back saying: ‘The Conservatives mustn’t be the bring back party’. It was easy to get a round of applause at a Conservative Party Conference for saying we should bring back hanging, or matron, or grammar schools, he sneered. But should we not consider the issue on its merits? Earlier this year, the Conservatives favoured bringing back some form of national service. That might have been a good idea. Bringing back matrons in hospital wards might have been a bad idea. Or vice versa.
Anyway, the dispute about schools prompted another form of class war. George Osborne told David Miliband, the Labour Schools Minister at the time: ‘Oh, David, don’t bother about Graham. He’s a grammar-school boy, you know.’
Boris Johnson was in the Conservative shadow education team during the controversy and recalled that once they finished a meeting denouncing selective education, they would then chat about how their children were getting on swotting up for entrance exams into (ferociously selective) independent schools.
Thus snobbery became a fuel of Conservative disunity. (Brady suspects that Cameron shared the disdain but was better than Osborne at concealing it.)
That’s just a symptom though. There would be divisions aroused from personalities. Jealousy of Boris Johnson’s celebrity status. Contempt for Theresa May being the antithesis – her woodenness prompting most of her colleagues to conclude they could do a better job. The backbenches would simmer with rivalries and resentments. A leader would be allowed to stay on a transactional basis if it was felt they could deliver an election victory.
It is naive to imagine such unedifying feuding could be eliminated. But it would help if Conservative MPs did not feel the need to like each other, but rather had a shared set of beliefs.
An analogy would be those who go to church to assert their faith. CS Lewis’s Screwtape, as a senior demon, wishing to thwart such a process wished the congregation to focus on those of their neighbours who ‘sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes’ and then ‘quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous’.
Margaret Thatcher survived longer than most Conservative leaders. Some certainly backed her while they felt she was an election winner. Some of the wets were bought off with ministerial posts – if she felt they had administrative or communications ability and were willing to implement her policies. But it did also help that she could articulate a clear set of beliefs than many, though by no means all, of her colleagues came to share.
All the Conservative leadership candidates are stressing the need for unity. But a leadership cult around whoever is elected is not the way to sustain that. Brady’s fascinating but depressing memoirs show the best way for the Conservatives to avoid endless leadership challenges is to have a shared mission. That is what increasingly eroded over the last 14 years.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
