Your essential guide to who’s who in the 1922 Committee (original) (raw)

According to Westminster cliché, they are “the men in suits”, harrumphing Osbert Lancaster colonels in gusseted spongebag trousers. In reality the 1922 Committee is more plugged in, less velvety and not even all male. Not a single moustache! Today’s “22” is, instead, pretty much what you would expect from the Conservative backbenchers’ trade union: slow to move but, when so compelled, cold to sentimentality. Being composed of MPs, it is also prey to a certain amount of vanity and one-upmanship.

The committee is chaired by Sir Graham Brady, 54, for whom the term “bottom” could have been minted. It is Brady to whom MPs hand letters stating lack of confidence in Boris Johnson. It is Brady who will tell the PM the sticky news if the threshold has been reached. Brady, like the majority of his committee a sceptic of lockdown, has been MP for Altrincham and Sale West since 1997. A veteran of the Blair years he has a keener memory than younger colleagues of the dustiness of opposition. In 2007 he quit the front bench over David Cameron’s opposition to grammar schools.

Since then Brady, himself grammar-educated, has become a treacle-seasoned grandee, loyal to the grassroots, lofty towards ministers. He is not entirely without personal ambition: when Theresa May fell, Brady toyed with standing for the leadership. All a little embarrassing, really.

Chairmanship of the 22 is what he was made for. In 1997 Labour MPs took a look at him and shouted “it’s Prince Andrew!” at him. Maybe people nowadays shout “it’s Sir Graham Brady!” at the Duke of York.

The 22’s vice-chairs are William Wragg and Nusrat Ghani, Brexiteers who have turned against Johnson, both a little publicity-prone. As a junior transport minister, Ghani, 49, was enthusiastic rather than cerebral. Gosh, she was cross when demoted in 2020. Thought she should have been promoted instead. She has since made little effort to disguise her pique. Wragg, 34 going on 60, carries less of the tang of vengeance and was a model of old-world understatement when he accused the whips of intimidating backbenchers. Interested in campanology, he seems intent on tolling the bell for Boris.

The 22’s other officers are Bob Blackman and Gary Sambrook (executive secretaries) and Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (treasurer). The unflashy Blackman, 65, spends much of his time speaking up for the Indian community in Harrow East.

Burly Sambrook, 32, not a man to get behind in the kebab shop, took Birmingham Northfield from Labour in 2019 and was one of the pork pie putschers plotting against Johnson early last week — so much so that Ghani walked over to squeeze his arm in comradeship before last Wednesday’s PMQs. But Sambrook reacted angrily when Bury South’s Christian Wakeford defected to Labour. The lad may be waking up to the ramifications of regicide.

Clifton-Brown, 68, inherited Cirencester and Tewkesbury (now the Cotswold seat) from the combustive Nicholas Ridley. Two of his forebears became Commons Speaker but ministerial office and its trimming tribulations has so far eluded the gentlemanly Geoffrey. He called lockdown “alien to our way of life”.

And that, really, is the point of the 1922 Committee. It is not an ex-ministers’ club. Its other members include both the McCartneys, Lincoln’s Karl, 53 (pugnacious, anti-wokery), and Colne Valley’s voluble Jason, 53 (a sometime TV sports reporter who works his constituency into his numerous Commons speeches). Nicola Richards, 27, seized West Bromwich East (Tom Watson’s old seat) for the Tories in 2019 and is impressively unfazed by authority or age. Sheryll Murray is that rarity at Westminster, an MP who knows there is more to life than politics. The 65-year-old is the Cornish trawlerman’s wife who was widowed when he was lost at sea in 2011. Since remarried, she has never shown much interest in careerism.

To balance the north-west English slant of Brady and Wragg, the 22 has two north-easterners, Richard Holden, 36, and Martin Vickers, 71. Both rose in the Commons during levelling-up questions yesterday, Holden (North West Durham) to ask about social housing, Vickers to make a characteristically local point about public services in Barton-upon-Humber in his Cleethorpes seat. Neither fits the description of rebel but both would likely put Tory party fortunes well ahead of the personal survival of Boris Johnson.

And then there is Harwich and North Essex’s Sir Bernard Jenkin, our last member (though he might not see it that way) of the 1922, the Sergeant Wilson of Westminster, charming, urbane, not entirely of this world. Two decades ago he was one of Iain Duncan Smith’s lieutenants and saw first-hand how backbench plotting can sabotage a Tory leader. Since then he has regarded it as rather poor form. Not that he would fall out over it.

Bernard, 62, is too genial for that.