Lord Brady, Kingmaker: the time I resigned over grammar schools
Graham Brady quits over grammar schools row (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
9 min read
In an exclusive extract from former 1922 Committee chair Lord Brady’s memoir, Kingmaker, he tells the story of how a fiery clash over grammar schools prompted his resignation from the Conservative front bench
Liz Lightfoot, education correspondent at the Daily Telegraph, phoned me. “Have you seen this stupid speech that ‘Two Brains’ is giving tomorrow?” ‘Two Brains’ was David Willetts’ [then shadow education secretary] nickname, and he was giving a speech at the Confederation of British Industry. I hadn’t, and I also thought it best to decline to comment outside my brief.
It seemed that the plan was to talk about our support for ‘academy’ schools – an innovation which had been adopted by Labour when they realised that their original policy of abolishing the ‘grant-maintained’ status introduced by the Major government had been a mistake. When I was shadow schools minister, dealing with the Education Act 2002 in its bill committee, my only criticism of Labour’s academies was that they were given some autonomy, but not enough.
The only point of doing the job at all is to fight for what you believe in, and I was being asked to do the opposite
Worried that his speech wouldn’t attract any interest, Willetts decided to spice it up by including a big section on academic selection and grammar schools. In a nutshell, his argument was that grammar schools used to drive social mobility, but that social and demographic changes in recent decades meant that grammar schools no longer worked in the same way and could actually impede social mobility.
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.
Listening to Willetts being interviewed by Jim Naughtie on the Today programme the morning before the speech, I hit the roof. The speech had been bad enough, but here he was going further!
I called Andrew MacKay, MP for Bracknell and Cameron’s parliamentary adviser. Andrew and I have been friends since I was vice-chairman of his former association (East Berkshire). I told him that I needed to know whether this was a deliberate attempt to provoke a row, or just incompetence. He came back from the leader’s morning meeting and assured me that it was just a cock-up.
Oddly, the speech had been rubber-stamped by the shadow cabinet when David Cameron was away on a regional visit. The meeting was chaired by William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, which was ironic given that as shadow Europe minister, I was number two in Hague’s team. Apparently there were some objections, but the agenda moved on without any agreement to think again about the speech.
David Cameron’s mistake was to fail to see how damaging the ensuing row would be, and then to dig in behind David Willetts rather than listening to the rest of the Conservative Party. I had pledged my support to my local grammar schools in 1997, 2001 and 2005. I had championed them from the back benches and then as shadow minister for schools. When I moved on from the shadow education team, my successors would still welcome my support in the Chamber whenever grammar schools were debated. If I had gone quietly, it would have been a hideous breach of faith with the people who elected me. I decided that I really must continue to make the case.
I took a call from the New Statesman. Would I write a piece that morning rebutting Willetts? There was another call, this time from the BBC’s Daily Politics show, asking could they have an interview at lunchtime? Yes to both. I messaged Andrew MacKay about the BBC and said that I would try to stick to just a rebuttal of the Willetts argument. I went off to pre-record the interview and when I got back to the office in Portcullis House, Vic [my wife] told me that Andrew MacKay and the Chief Whip had both called in to try to dissuade me from doing it.
I duly walked through the corridors to the Chief’s office and we had a very friendly chat in which I said that I would try to avoid doing further national media. I knew, of course, that between the Daily Politics interview and the New Statesman piece online, the media would already have everything they needed to run a story from lunchtime into the next day. But I declined further bids.
The Conservative Party, both in Parliament and beyond, was furious with Willetts. He was summoned to appear at that evening’s 1922 Committee meeting. Robert Key kicked off with an emotional speech about his local grammar school feeling as though it had been “stabbed in the back”. I spoke about the huge political damage that had been done. Roger Gale spoke about David Willetts’ “want” for good advice – ouch! That was a reference to an episode years earlier when Willetts had to resign as a government whip after appearing to try to interfere with a select committee – his excuse was that he’d asked the chairman if he “wanted advice” in the archaic sense of being ‘wanting for’ it.
Hugh Robertson talked about the damage in his Kent constituency. In all, there were over 15 speakers who criticised the speech, and our former leader Michael Howard (Llanelli Grammar) banged his desk loudly in support of every one of us. Just one member, Ed Vaizey (Eton College), spoke in favour of Willetts. He was heard in stony silence.
Immediately after this meeting, I wrote to Willetts and to Cameron, pointing out what needed to be done to repair the damage and offering to help them build bridges. I received a bland acknowledgement. Handled properly, this could have been a three-day wonder, but by the weekend Cameron was deliberately stoking the tension to demonstrate his macho leadership. Over the next week, he told journalists that those who supported selection were “splashing in the shallow end of the debate” and when confronted by a poll showing that 75 per cent of the Conservative Party disagreed with him, he responded with: “I lead my party, I don’t follow it.”
At this point, Thursday 24 May, an enterprising young lobby journalist, Sam Coates of The Times, saw an answer to a written parliamentary question that I had tabled some time before. The data provided by the Department for Education showed that pupils in selective areas as a whole got more good GCSE grades than pupils in comprehensive areas. Furthermore, the figures showed that every single ethnic group in the country, including White British, performed better at GCSE in areas with academic selection.
Asked to supply a quote for The Times, I said: “These facts appear to confirm my own experiences: that selection raises the standards for everyone – in both grammar and high schools in selective areas... I accept the party’s policy on grammar schools but it is vitally important that policy should be developed with a full understanding of all of these facts which might lead to the introduction of selection in other ways, including partial selection in academies and other schools.”
In the same article, Professor Alan Smithers of the University of Buckingham said that these figures were significant: “It’s acknowledged that grammar schools work very well for children in them, but the argument against has always been that children who don’t go to the grammar achieve below what they would get in a comprehensive system. But it does look as though it is difficult to sustain the argument.”
I had started to look forward to the article appearing on the Whit Bank Holiday Monday on 28 May. This turned out to be the day after Cameron upped the ante again by calling critics of his policy “inverted class warriors”. Even though the Willetts speech had been an unplanned provocation, it was starting to look like Dave now saw it as a ‘Clause 4’ moment and that by attacking grammar schools and those who advocated selective education, he could prove he had modernised the Conservative Party.
Vic and I were driving down to Winchester to have lunch with one of her former Meridian TV colleagues when Patrick McLoughlin, the Chief Whip, called me on my mobile. I pulled over to take the call.
“Hello, Patrick.”
“Graham, I’ve just been reading the fucking Times. I thought you were our fucking spokesman on Europe but you keep talking about fucking education! If you don’t fucking stop talking about fucking education, you’ll have to stop being our fucking spokesman on Europe. Is that understood?”
A massively stressful two weeks was coming to a head. I told Patrick that his advice was understood and spent the afternoon being a very distant lunch guest as I tried to work out what course of action to follow. Patrick McLoughlin and I had known each other for a long time and I have always respected him. He was simply doing his job as Chief Whip, albeit with a colourful turn of phrase. The fact is that in a system based on collective responsibility, when the policy changes by 180 degrees, you either change with it or you leave the front bench. I was 90 per cent decided when I read in Tuesday morning’s papers that David Cameron’s spokesman had said that I had been reprimanded and would be lucky to survive a reshuffle.
I decided that it wasn’t lucky at all – it would be completely unsustainable. Being an MP is a difficult job and there are a lot of ways to make more money, working shorter hours. The only point of doing the job at all is to fight for what you believe in, and I was being asked to do the opposite. Conservatives, whether we want more grammar schools or not, believe in excellence, diverse educational provision and choice. The fact that after 14 years of Conservative – or partly Conservative – government, the statutory ban on new grammar schools remains in place in 2024 should make those responsible deeply ashamed. In 1997, when I volunteered to sit on the bill committee for the School Standards and Framework Bill in order to defend my local grammar schools, it never crossed my mind that ten years later I would be resigning from the front bench in a row over education policy.
Vic and I went into the office and I composed my letter of resignation.
I wrote: “Faced with a choice of a front bench position that I have loved, and doing what I believe to be right for my constituents and for the many hundreds of thousands of families who are ill-served by state education in this country, there is in conscience only one decision open to me.”
Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers, by Sir Graham Brady, is out now (Ithaca Press)
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