Lord Graham Brady’s reputation for seeing off prime ministers has made him something of a celebrity in the world of politics.
But informing a Tory leader their time is up isn’t always a pleasant task, the former chairman of the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee has told Sky News.
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That was required of him on more than one occasion during his 14 years presiding over the influential group of backbench MPs, a period which saw five prime ministers, Brexit, COVID and the war in Ukraine.
The most difficult, he told the Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge, was Theresa May.
She became prime minister in 2016, after David Cameron resigned over the EU referendum result, and was brought down by opposition to her Brexit deal three years later.
It was never going to be easy, but after her gamble on a snap general election in 2017 backfired, “it moved from being very difficult to being utterly impossible because we didn’t have a majority in the House of Commons”, he said.
“It had become apparent Theresa May could not deliver the central objective of her government.
“And I think it was apparent to nearly all colleagues she was going to have to go.”
But having already survived a vote of no confidence, it was down to the former home secretary to resign of her own accord – or else face the 1922 Committee changing the rules to allow another chance for her own MPs to kick her out.
Lord Brady, who quit as an MP ahead of the July election, said: “I had a number of discussions with her, which led ultimately to the point where she accepted she was going to have to name a date for departure, and that was the most painful.”
He added that it was “obviously a very difficult point” for Mrs May, who gave a tearful resignation in May 2019, “and it was something I took no pleasure in doing”.
“But I was trying to get to the point where she could have a departure which was less bloody, less traumatic than it might otherwise have been,” he said.
There was no such problem for Liz Truss, who became the shortest serving prime minister in modern British history after her disastrous mini-budget spooked the markets and turned the public and her party against her.
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Despite being unrepentant since then, blaming things like the “deep state” on her downfall, she knew she was finished when Lord Brady came knocking, he said.
“By the time I went to see her to say I thought the time was up, she agreed.
“That became a very easy conversation.”
He added: “Had she not resigned that day, I think we would have had a confidence vote on it and I strongly suspect she would have lost it.
“In fact, what happened was that she had come to the same conclusion as I had, and others had, that there was just no way of getting that all back on the road and functioning.”
As for Boris Johnson, who faced a confidence vote over the partygate scandal, Lord Brady said those who make the rules should play by them.
“The fact that Boris presided over these ever-changing hugely complicated [COVID] rules and guidelines, that supplied the ultimate irony that that was what then ensnared him,” he said.
