Kingmaker
Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers
Sir Graham Brady
Ithaka Press, 2024
In the publishing world, the fashion for pithy one word titles continues unabated. I see that Boris’s latest tome is “Unleashed”. The part of Sir Graham Brady’s memoir devoted to Boris begins with the chapter, “HE’S NOT SANE!” For Sir Graham, “Kingmaker” implies that as chairman of the backbench 1922 committee he was something of an éminence grise. But given his modest demeanour, I think Sir Graham wold have denied he held such power. Indeed, you might understand his book simply as a rather mundane piece of bookkeeping. He would receive from MPs letters of no confidence in the incumbent prime minister, and lock them away in a safe until their number exceeded that required to trigger a vote. Or, in the event that the Tory Party were electing a new Prime Minister, he would dutifully announce the number of votes cast by the parliamentary party for each contender, remove the least successful candidate from the ballot paper, and move on sequentially to the next vote, until the last two members standing could be presented to the party membership. Reading all this, I was reminded of Conclave (another one word title) a book by Robert Harris, recently, I believe, made into a film, about the cardinals in the Vatican shutting themselves up for a similar series of sequential votes for the next pope, and staying in seclusion until white smoke finally emanated from the chimney. Habemus papam. It’s hard to imagine that might be the stuff of a thriller, and similarly the number-crunching in Room 14 at the Palace of Westminster might be mind-numbingly tedious.
But I have a fascination for the lives, or at least their time spent in office, of British prime ministers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the passage of time they seem to have become more numerous. There have been five in the last eight years. It was always difficult to ascend the greasy pole, “the slipper slope”, but recently it seems to have become impossible, having made the ascent, to stay up there. Doubtless this reflects the political and economic turbulence that has characterised British public life since the economic crash, Brexit, and the pandemic. Sir Graham examines five tenures, those of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, and the “events, dear boy” – Harold Macmillan’s remark – that truncated them.
David Cameron’s was the longest run – six years. He oversaw three referenda, and won two of them – First Past the Post versus Proportional Representation, which went by, and went the way of FPTP, almost unnoticed; then the Scottish Referendum, which he won, although he and Chancellor George Osborne must have broken into a sweat when they saw the polls just prior to September 18th 2014. Lastly, Brexit, which he lost. He never thought he would need to run that referendum, because he thought he would still be in coalition with the Lib Dems, and the Lib Dems would never have allowed it. Events, dear boy. So the podium came out into Downing Street, he resigned, and walked away whistling a breezy tune – an old Etonian’s show of insouciance.
Boris might have been next, but Boris got stabbed in the front by Michael Gove and, in any case, for whatever reason, he chose not to run. Thus Mrs May attained the highest office. But Mrs May had been a Remainer, so it was always going to be impossible for her. There was a protracted period when you could not hear the BBC News because of the strident laments of Remainers on College Green. Mrs May kept trying to cobble together a leave package, each one heavily defeated in the House of Commons. She called a snap election to try and bolster her power base, but it all went wrong and she became heavily reliant upon the support of the DUP. The attorney general in his booming baritone declared this parliament to be a dead parliament. She had to go.
Enter Boris, unleashed. He vowed to “get Brexit done”. He had an oven-ready deal. He would rather be found dead in a ditch than not leave. A hard Brexit loomed. Then, dear boy, “events”. Covid. Covid nearly killed the Prime Minister. But in the end it was his scant disregard for the rules, those of his own devising, that killed him politically. Partygate.
Liz Truss was duly elected. Her shelf life was famously shorter than that of a lettuce. Or was it a cabbage? She “spooked the markets”. She was defiant. She said she was a fighter, not a quitter. The next day, she quit. There were three contenders to succeed – Boris, Penny Mordaunt, and Rishi Sunak. The 1922 Committee contrived a rule that each contender would require at least 100 parliamentary nominations. Boris withdrew (again), Ms Mordaunt didn’t reach the threshold, so in effect Rishi’s was a coronation.
But by now the Tory government was on its last legs and consistently badly behind in the polls. There was no political advantage to Rishi calling an early election on July 4th 2024, and I sometimes wonder if he made an honourable decision to go to the country sooner rather than later, just to get on with it.
Enter Sir Keir Starmer; but of course, Sir Keir was not part of Sir Graham’s remit. He came in with a huge majority and a huge mandate, reminiscent of that of Tony Blair on 1997. But the first 100 days don’t seem to have gone well, and who knows, maybe Labour’s 1922 equivalent, the men in suits, are already circling.
Is Kingmaker a kiss-and-tell book? It’s not vindictive, although occasionally it can be startlingly candid. Rishi Sunak comes across best in terms of his humanity. And Ms May is honourable, if perhaps not a “people person”. Reading Kingmaker, one has the impression that twenty-first century PMs are fated to topple like nine-pins. There were, if memory serves me right, twenty PMs in the twentieth century, and already in the first quarter of the twenty-first there have been eight. Yet perhaps this acceleration of “events” is an illusion. After all, the period 1900 to 1924 actually saw nine PMS come and go – Salisbury, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Baldwin, and Ramsay MacDonald. Events, dear boy. It was ever thus.
jamescalumcampbell 