Graham Brady: Boris spat ‘Backbench MPs have been contemptible! Spineless chickens–t!’

In the second extract from memoir Kingmaker, the 1922 Committee’s former chair discusses Covid, Johnson’s rant and Hunt turning on Truss

After Theresa May’s premiership I was feeling physically and mentally drained. At least it would be a dull parliament, I thought when Boris became leader, one in which the chairman of the 1922 Committee might have little influence and not much to do. Then, in January, news started to appear of a new virus that was affecting people in Wuhan, China. 
I watched much of the government’s early handling of the Covid-19 pandemic unfold with deep concern. On Thursday March 19 2020, the government pushed emergency legislation through the House of Commons without a vote. The legislation would give the government sweeping powers, especially to spend taxpayers’ money. David Davis had the presence of mind to table an amendment to require six-monthly renewal, which a number of us supported. This was the first of many moments during the pandemic when the complete absence of a functioning Opposition was felt. Surely Sir Keir Starmer should have wanted to ensure parliamentary oversight of the government during a crisis?
In the middle of May 2020, I secured an in-person meeting with Johnson, the first since December. He looked weary, certainly not back to full strength after contracting Covid himself. He seemed oblivious to the massive economic, social and non-Covid health costs that the lockdown would cause. 
He readily agreed with me that the evidence suggested that the important interventions were hand hygiene and disinfection of surfaces, but when I suggested that the two-metre ‘social distancing’ rule should be reduced, he recoiled with horror. 
‘It’s people like us who get it really bad!’ he exclaimed, looking at me. ‘Not athletic… I was a fatty…17 and a half stone when I went into hospital.’ 
That same month, after stories emerged about the PM’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, having broken lockdown rules by driving from London to his parents’ home in Durham, with a side trip to Barnard Castle, I saw Boris again. He opened the door to his office looking like s—: frizzy hair and black rings around his eyes. I was astonished to see that on this occasion, his chaperone was the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. 
I started with substantive points about the restrictions, reminding him of the impact on the aviation sector, which threw him a bit. Rishi said nothing but was obviously enjoying seeing someone else try to make the case for more nuanced restrictions that would do less collateral damage. I then launched into Cummings. ‘This is damaging the party, the government and damaging you personally. Colleagues are really angry.’ 
Boris spat back: ‘I think backbench MPs have been contemptible! They have been spineless chickens—. They need to develop some backbone. The 2019 guys need to understand that they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Dom.’ 
I said that I had no personal animus against Cummings but that the row was hugely damaging and most of us thought he should resign. 
‘But don’t you believe his account? I believe it!’ 
‘The Barnard Castle story is obvious bulls— – no sane person would drive their wife and small child 30 miles to test his eyesight!’ 
Boris looked totally perplexed at this. ‘HE’S NOT SANE!’ He replied, as though that should have been obvious.
I briefly wondered whether Boris was also losing it. 
As I left, Rishi left with me and invited me into his office to discuss the two-metre rule further. ‘You’re right, of course; it’s all going wrong because it was a mistake to put the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Officer in the press conference every day,’ he said. ‘We thought it would give us cover, but now we can’t do anything sensible without them denouncing it as a risk.’ 
Days later, I requested a meeting with Boris about another matter but he phoned me first. ‘First, can I apologise for being intemperate with you when we met… it’s not your fault, you’re just doing your job, and you do it brilliantly… And I do understand the frustration of colleagues. I responded like that because I was so f—— angry myself. The f—— Barnard Castle optician trip for Christ’s sake!’
On schools, Boris said he agreed. ‘It’s this stupid f—–g two-metre rule, we’re going to review it – we’ll sort it. It’s these f—–g scientists!’ It seemed he was being hoist by his own petard. 
I bumped into Sir Robert Syms in the corridor. ‘There’s no leadership, no direction!’ 
In mid-June, I finally got a slot for the whole executive committee to meet with Boris. I started by asking the PM to talk us through the balance of risks between Covid-19, non-Covid health, economic cost and civil liberties. He vomited forth a torrent of words. One of his favourite tactics is talking rapidly while not leaving space for anyone to interject. 
About 10 minutes in, I tried to push him on getting Britain back to work and ending the 14-day quarantine period. This merely triggered more waffle. ‘Moving as fast as we can! It’s the bloody scientists! It’s like that terrible Freudian dream where your feet are moving rapidly – but you don’t go anywhere.’ Looking vaguely shifty, he asked me, ‘Do you have that?’ 
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Thankfully not.’ I was tempted to add that it might be because my conscience was clear.
Long after the easing of restrictions and the introduction of the ‘rule of six’, I was invited to meet Boris for a drink in his Commons office, after having had no contact through the summer. I assumed that I would, at least, find him well briefed. 
I tried to have a rational conversation with him about how the earlier link between infection rates and hospitalisation had been broken. He looked desperate to prove me wrong. ‘Hospital numbers are rising! It’s 192 this week, last week it was 100, the future looks grim.’ He told me why Lord Sumption was wrong to make the case that people should be trusted to manage their own risk. ‘What about the people you infect?’ 
I replied that I was with Jonathan Sumption. People can also take responsibility for those around them. He gave me a frightened look. ‘How many people would you let die?’
We had already looked at the figures showing that hospital admissions and transfer to ICU were no longer tracking infection rates. I added that quality of life matters too. I asked him when the ‘rule of six’ would end and by what criteria. He gave me a bewildered look, as though it was a crazy question. 
From the very start of Boris’s time as leader, there was division in the ranks. Two MPs, including the veteran Sir Roger Gale, had put no-confidence letters in very early in Boris’s time as leader.  As allegations began to emerge of parties in Number 10 during Covid lockdowns, a steady stream of letters began to emerge. Fourteen by the end of December 13: ‘I have had enough of constantly defending the indefensible’ said one.
On April 12 2022, news broke that the Met had given fixed penalty notices [for a rule-breaking gathering to celebrate Boris’s birthday in June 2020] not only to a number of Downing Street staff, but also to the PM and chancellor.
I was sitting in my office that afternoon when an unknown number flashed up on my mobile. Seconds later it rang again, with a call from Rishi Sunak’s mobile. 
‘Hi, Graham, can I ask for your advice? It doesn’t sit right with me just to carry on after being fined by the police. What do you think? Should I resign?’
I replied that a clean break might well be in his interests – showing integrity, distancing him from Boris and allowing him to come back to high office very soon. However, it might not be in the best interests of the government or the party. It would put intense pressure on Boris, and Rishi would be blamed for that by some colleagues. 
It was seven hours before Rishi made a statement and it was clear he had decided to stay. 
As we approached the [late Queen’s Platinum] Jubilee, we were perilously close to the threshold of 54 letters. It looked like we’d make it through the weekend without any upset. But then three more arrived! By Saturday June 4, the height of the celebrations, I had 60 letters, with more promised on the Monday. Again, I had to decide when to inform Boris, with the twin obligations of not disrupting the jubilee and not triggering a reaction that might be even more damaging to the party. 
At 12:01pm on Sunday June 5, I messaged Boris on WhatsApp. It was nearly 12:30 when he called. He was about to leave Number 10 with Carrie to join the Queen viewing the jubilee procession, and I told him the threshold had been passed.
‘When? What caused it? Was it a reaction to a particular event?’ I replied that there had been an element of post-dated communication, and colleagues were very keen not to harm the jubilee celebration. ‘Ah, Her Maj’s party! Got it! Quite right!’  
He then commenced a long rambling passage of self-defence and self-justification: ‘They have no plan!… What would they do about the Northern Ireland protocol? The Single Market? The Irish Border?… We need to smash on! I’ve still got a lot of things that I promised to deliver!… They would be mad to get rid of a leader who won the biggest Conservative majority since 1987!’  
We agreed that the vote should be held as soon as possible.
He won it, with a dangerously narrow margin of 58.8 per cent – worse than Theresa May’s result in 2018 and she was gone six months later. Boris would be gone in weeks. No one could have predicted that it would be his handling of a tawdry sex scandal that would end his premiership. 
I had always found Liz Truss somewhat peculiar, and as with many of her predecessors, I was surprised that Tory members were enamoured with her. She had a reputation among my colleagues for being an adventurous risk-taker and she certainly exuded a strange kind of energy in person, but her idiosyncratic manner was also well known.
In fairness, a lot of the political direction Liz was staking out in the leadership election [announced after the resignation of Johnson in July 2022] appealed to me. She made a strong critique of the way government was currently stifling, rather than enabling, economic growth. She voiced the concerns of many of us about the absurdly high tax burden that the party of low taxes was heaping on voters. But it wasn’t a hard decision to vote for Rishi. I’d rather have someone who projected more of an air of sanity. 
She won with a commanding lead – but when Truss crashed from office so quickly, a number of slightly paranoid supporters took to saying that the parliamentary party was determined to bring her down from the start. This was emphatically not true. There were many colleagues, including me, who were at least mildly surprised to find that Liz Truss had become prime minister, but almost all shared the view that we had to make it work because we just could not go through such a protracted leadership contest again.
Turmoil at the top also made life difficult for the Conservative Party fundraisers. Donations became scarcer in the dying months of Boris’s time. The excellent Malik Karim, our treasurer, told me what a battle it was to keep the show on the road through the transitions from Johnson to Truss to Sunak. I think he may have been responsible for the last act of torture in the interminable leadership campaign when both Truss and Sunak were forced to attend a fundraising dinner on the eve of the announcement. 
I had my first meeting with prime minister Truss on Thursday September 22. We were joined in her Commons office by Suzanne Webb, the Stourbridge MP who was the new PPS to the PM. She seemed pleasant enough, but quite inexperienced for such a big role, especially given the choppy waters. A lack of experience turned out to be a problem throughout the Truss camp, though it was by no means the fatal flaw.
I started by making sure she had the 1922 Committee centenary celebrations in her diary. Then she asked me about the Standards Committee report into Boris Johnson and Partygate, saying: ‘I wish it wasn’t happening but I think we have to let it conclude. What do you think?’ I agreed, and commented that after the failed attempt to interfere in the handling of the Owen Paterson case [after the MP for North Shropshire broke lobbying rules], it would be dangerous for her to be seen to try to intervene. So far so good. 
Then, on September 23, Truss’s chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, delivered a ministerial statement in the Commons. I couldn’t be there because the MOT was about to expire on my 14-year-old Audi and I had to get it to the garage. I missed a sensational statement, it turned out. The chancellor announced a £60 billion support package to cap fuel bills that had shot up alarmingly due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a £2 billion measure to scrap the 45p top rate of income tax. When the pound plummeted afterwards, it was widely believed to be solely due to the unfunded tax cuts. Scrapping the 45p tax rate ‘to help the rich’ became the big story. 
We had a busy constituency weekend. By the Monday, the episode appeared to have accelerated the rises in interest rates that had already begun around the world. I got a message from a constituent who was very big in commercial property. The ‘news from the front’ was that in one and a half days, the market had fallen by 20 per cent. 
I thought this was the kind of real-time intelligence that might be helpful for the chancellor and I forwarded the WhatsApp message to him. He responded: ‘Pro bono publico, no bloody panico.’ It’s an old Tory parliamentary joke, quoting Rear-Admiral Morgan Morgan-Giles speaking at the ’22 in 1972 calling for calm at the time of British accession to the European Community. It did smack of complacency in the aftermath of the mini-budget, though.
By party conference season, the political fallout from the mini-budget was starting to look at least as bad as the economic consequences. When she went on to U-turn on much of her mini-budget programme and sack her chosen chancellor to bring in someone (Jeremy Hunt) who had supported her opponent in the leadership election, Liz was doing what was necessary to restore the government’s credibility. But she was shredding her own. 
The government was teetering badly. On Saturday October 15, we flew back into Heathrow [after a work trip in Greece]. While waiting to board the flight, my friend Steve Baker called me: ‘Graham, as a loyal minister, I want Liz to succeed, but being me, I’m also gaming all the other scenarios. We have to come together around Ben Wallace. We also need to find a way to involve the party members – maybe by offering them a bigger role in future leadership elections?’
I suggested that we should be careful not to leave those who came after us with even bigger problems than we faced.
On Monday October 17, while in the Commons chamber to hear then Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt responding to Sir Keir Starmer’s Urgent Question about the crisis, I slipped out of the chamber to meet Truss in the Commons office. Her two PPSs were sitting on the sofas. She asked them to leave us alone. 
Truss was not cowering behind her desk, as Labour MP Stella Creasy had suggested in the chamber, but she did look drained and almost broken. She told me that Kwasi had let her down and that she was now dealing with his mistakes. We discussed whether it would be possible for her to survive. 
I asked what her current thinking was and explained that the parliamentary party seemed to be in three more or less equal groups: a third wanted her to go immediately; a third wanted her to go when we knew who to replace her with, and a third will always support the leader whoever it may be. Things would become untenable once the middle third joined the first. I told her that having appointed Hunt as chancellor and seen so much of her programme junked, she had restored market credibility, but lost her political credibility. She could no longer do any of the things that the Conservative Party elected her to do.
She countered that the middle third might instead be persuaded by her resolute leadership and fall back in behind her. ‘I sacked Kwasi because he let me down, he didn’t do the job of chancellor… I have made the right decisions to recover from the mistakes of the chancellor’s mini-budget. I won’t be resigning!’ She was absolutely determined that she would not go.
By that point it seemed impossible that she could continue, but for how long could she limp on?
I said that we should keep in touch and that I would try to support her for as long as that was a tenable position.
Soon after came the ‘Opposition Day’ debate in which the Labour Party was calling for a ban on fracking. A number of Conservative colleagues were keen to vote for the Labour motion, even though the chief whip had made it known that the vote would be treated as a ‘matter of confidence’. By the time the division bell rang for the 7pm vote, it was no longer being treated as a matter of confidence, and the chief whip, Wendy Morton, and her deputy had both resigned and there was chaos around the chamber. The prime minister was seen running through the No lobby trying to catch up with Morton, who had apparently repaired to the Smoking Room for a glass of wine, where she sat rejecting calls from Liz Truss on her mobile. Had there been such disorder in the Commons since the King’s troopers held Speaker Lenthall down in his chair?
I slept on the events of the day and woke the next morning convinced that the PM would have to go.
Sitting with a mug of black coffee at the flat, I reached for my mobile phone to call Number 10, but as I picked up my phone, it rang. ‘The PM would like to see you; what time can you be here? Come to the back entrance.’
I went to catch the bus and while I stood at the stop, I took a call from Jeremy Hunt and was on the phone as I boarded and took my seat. ‘Graham, I think you are seeing the PM this morning. She knows that she will have to go but I’m worried that she thinks she can promise to go in six months and that won’t work – she must go right away. Anything that you can do to persuade her would be really important. Thank you.’
I was shown into the prime minister’s study, which was not the same one that had habitually been used by Cameron, May and Johnson. Looking calm, she indicated that I should sit down on the sofa opposite her and we exchanged pleasantries, then she asked: ‘How bad do you think it is, Graham?’
‘I think it’s very bad.’
‘Do you think it’s retrievable?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t think it is.’
‘I’ve reached the same conclusion.’
I said how sorry I was that it was ending like this and that there was huge respect for her resilience. She smiled and actually looked relieved that it was all about to end. Finally, I offered a practical thought: ‘Now, I will need a car to take me back to the Commons so that I can avoid the media scrum – or if you prefer, I’m happy to stay here in the building until you have made your announcement.’
She thought for a brief moment before saying ‘Yes, let’s keep you here as a hostage!’
There was a playful smile on her face, even at such a painful moment.
The exchange was certainly easier than I had anticipated. The strain that had been obvious on her face at my two meetings with her earlier in the week had gone; she seemed calm, relaxed, perhaps relieved.
I was shown to an empty office and brought a phone charger, a mug of tea and a tuna sandwich from the Number 10 staff canteen. I put the TV on to watch the rolling news and followed stuff on Twitter and Facebook on my mobile phone. The whole world knew that I was in Number 10, but they had no idea that I was drinking tea alone and watching the telly.
Extracted from Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers, by Sir Graham Brady, is out on 26 September (£25, Ithaka Press); books.telegraph.co.uk  
I was the model of discretion… until now
Read the final extract on Sunday at 9.30pm: Sir Graham Brady: ‘Cameron and Osborne thought the rules didn’t apply to them. They simply had to win’