Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers by Graham Brady
The coalition with the Liberal Democrats led to Brexit. Graham Brady advances this paradox on page 103 of his 297-page memoir.
He points out that “no effort to reform our relationship” with the European Union was possible during the coalition from 2010-15 between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, so “all Cameron could offer to reduce tension was the future promise of a referendum”.
In Brady’s view, Cameron ran an Old Etonian “chumocracy” and demanded loyalty from Conservatives to whom he showed none in return, because he “never really understood the value of engaging with the party on its terms – or the danger of refusing to do so”.
While Cameron had “a veneer of politeness”, George Osborne was openly contemptuous of those below him:
“I remember walking into the Tea Room with him and David Miliband at the same time, when Miliband was the Labour Schools Minister [2002-04]. I’d just asked him a question in the Chamber about his Government’s policy on grammar schools – funnily enough – and when George clapped eyes on me, he turned to David Miliband, and said: ‘Oh, David, don’t bother about Graham. He’s a grammar school boy, you know.’ It was a particularly annoying comment, dismissive and haughty, but also a rather pathetic attempt to fraternise with the enemy. It underlined the way George, and I suppose David Cameron too, just didn’t understand those who weren’t their people, from their backgrounds.”
Brady, born in 1967 and from a working-class background, went to Altrincham Grammar School and Durham University, was from 1997-2024 MP for Altrincham and Sale West, and from 2010-24 Chairman of the 1922 Committee.
Cameron, born in 1966, went to Eton and Oxford, was from 2001-16 MP for Witney, and from 2005-16 Leader of the Conservative Party. He won the leadership, Brady reminds us, in part by making a concession on Europe: the promise, which in due course he kept, to withdraw from the European People’s Party.
In 2007 David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, delivered a speech in which he contended that grammar schools, far from promoting social mobility, might actually be impeding it. Brady writes:
“For those of us representing areas where academic selection was working very well indeed, the speech was a disaster. In many parts of England, Conservative support for grammar schools was a fundamental reason why people voted for us. Here was a Conservative Education spokesman effectively offering to write the campaign literature of the anti-selection brigade.”
Brady “hit the roof” and took to the airwaves. Willetts was summoned to appear at a meeting of the 1922 Committee where “over 15 speakers” criticised his line on grammar schools, and only one, Ed Vaizey, mistakenly described in this book as an Old Etonian, defended it.
Cameron backed Willetts and according to Brady, “saw the row about grammar schools as another marketing opportunity in which he could define himself against his party”.
In his own memoir, For The Record, Cameron writes:
“I felt that the call to ‘bring back grammars’ was an anti-modernisation proxy, and I wasn’t going to stand for it.”
Brady refused to support the Cameron line, indeed went on attacking it, so resigned from the post of Shadow Europe Minister.
The next big row erupted in 2009 during the expenses scandal, which Cameron, according to Brady,
“wanted to use for political advantage and wasn’t much bothered how many of his colleagues would have to be thrown under a bus as he did so.”
Cameron set up a “tribunal” to determine how much money each Conservative MP should repay. Brady relates that he was about to visit his local Conservative Association Executive:
“As I got out of the car in the church hall car park, Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s Chief of Staff and a fellow Old Etonian, called to tell me that the ‘tribunal’ had determined that I should repay £3,500 because of having claimed expenses for things that it had deemed inappropriate.
“My response shocked him: ‘I can’t.’
“‘What do you mean, can’t?’
“‘I mean that after doing this fucking job for 12 years, I have no money,’ I snapped. ‘And earlier today, the bank wrote to me saying it wanted me to repay my overdraft. So I mean that I can’t.’
“‘Oh.’ He was silent for a beat. ‘Let me see what I can do. It doesn’t need to be immediate.’”
For two and a half years, Cameron “hadn’t bothered to meet me”, but on hearing at the end of 2009 that Brady is planning to stand as Chairman of the ’22, he calls him in and invites him to return to the front bench.
Brady, whose wife is in hospital after suffering a near-fatal aneurysm, rejects the offer. He points out that the Chairman of the ’22 will matter after the election, while most ministers do not matter, now that government has become so centralised.
During the 2010 election campaign, Brady finds that Cameron is “offering little of substance” and voters are unconvinced. The Conservatives duly fail to win an overall majority, and Brady is “shocked” to hear on the radio that Cameron has made a “big, bold and generous” offer to the Lib Dems to go into coalition.
Brady calls instead for a “confidence and supply” arrangement with the Lib Dems, to be followed by “another election in the autumn which we could win outright”.
But Cameron bounces the party into coalition, and tries and fails to neuter the ’22, of which Brady duly becomes Chairman.
Before long the issue of Europe comes up. In October 2011 a petition calling for an In/Out Referendum attracts over 100,000 signatures, meaning it must be debated. Brady manages to get a motion which includes three options: In, Out, or renegotiate the terms of membership, the last being his own preference.
The 2010 Conservative manifesto had included a commitment to renegotiate “which had quietly been forgotten about in the coalition agreement”. The Lib Dems, Brady reminds us, “had mischievously promised” an In/Out Referendum in their 2010 manifesto.
Brady recommends a free vote on this motion, but the Government imposes a three-line whip, against which 81 Conservative MPs including Brady rebel.
Cameron is furious with Brady, who fully reciprocates the feeling, and in this account contends that he, not Cameron, is being true to the Conservative programme:
“I wouldn’t have voted for an In or Out referendum, but this one offered the reform option that reflected the Conservative manifesto. I refrained from adding that it was a damned cheek coming from someone [i.e. Cameron] who had ripped up our manifesto.”
Brady contends that for Cameron, winning the 2015 general election was the “nightmare scenario”, for he was now obliged to hold the EU Referendum.
Cameron rejected Brady’s advice to behave like Harold Wilson in 1975, by making a speech setting out his view, but adding that “the choice is for you, the people”, and promising to implement whichever choice they made.
“I finally spotted his fatal flaw,” Brady says, and recounts a short conversation with Cameron which ends with the Prime Minister telling him: “I have to win.”
By being so determined to win the referendum, and fighting it in an “unprincipled” way, as if, Brady writes, the “rules didn’t apply to them”, Cameron and Osborne lost it. They offered voters who felt spurned an irresistible chance to give the arrogant, hypocritical Establishment an almighty kick.
Brady contends that Cameron had already fomented this anti-Establishment feeling within the Conservative Party by getting into bed with the Lib Dems, and appearing so happy with the arrangement that he wished to prolong it indefinitely.
In this memoir Brady goes on to recount his dealings with the next four Conservative PMs, he as Chairman of the ’22 being responsible for gathering the letters from MPs which when the 15 per cent threshold was reached would precipitate a no confidence vote.
One is reminded of the fluidity of politics, backbenchers often changing their minds, withdrawing a letter, only perhaps to send it in again.
The precariousness of power is a safeguard of liberty, but impartial umpires are also required, of whom Brady was one. Nobody ever doubted his integrity as he counted the letters and helped make the most reasonable, or least unreasonable, arrangements for the next leadership contest.
He is horrified by the collapse of parliamentary scrutiny during the Covid epidemic, a time when many MPs and members of the public were panicked into a safety first mentality which was not as it turned out particularly safe, when one counts the cost in lost schooling, lost medical treatments, lost billions.
Brady is a clunky writer, less smooth than Cameron, but for that reason more authentic. He conveys and explains the deep unhappiness of many Tory MPs as Cameron and Osborne led them away from Tory verities.
Just as Tony Blair made a good thing out of infuriating the Labour Party, so the Tory leadership for a rather shorter time made a good thing out of infuriating Conservatives.
In both cases, the unspoken assumption was that liberal-minded people could stay in power indefinitely by championing every progressive cause and ignoring people like Brady.
The idea that someone as old-fashioned as Nigel Farage might be in closer contact with the British people than they were was for Blair and Cameron inconceivable.
Historians who wish to understand why we had five PMs in rapid succession, and preferred the freedom of Brexit to the continued tutelage of Cameron and Osborne, will find this book invaluable.
