Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week we're taking a look inside the 1922 Committee,

the affected trade union for Conservative MPs, but also its confessional, and also its

Assassination Bureau, its infamous men in grey

suits, helping dispatch with multiple party leaders over the years.

To discuss the committee's history, its role and continued function as it marks its centenary

year, and they give no two better guests from my panel.

First up, we have Sir Graham Brady, the 22's current and longer serving chairman, who is preparing

to hand over the baton when he steps down as an MP next year.

And with him we have Lord Philip Norton, Tory peer and fresher of government at the University of Hull, known as the UK's greatest living expert on Parliament, but more importantly for us, the author of the recently published the 1922 Committee, Power Behind the Scenes, charting its 100 years of existence.

So I'm going to start with you, Philip, just explain

firstly what the 22 committee is and also why it's called the 922, because if it was a slightly

confusing name given we're in centenna a year in 2023. That's right, because the 922 committee isn't

named after the year it was formed, but by the fact it was created by the class of 1922. So the 1922 general election produced over

100 new Conservative MPs. Some of them were a little bewildered by the procedures, the

processes of Westminster. So got together to think, well, shall we create a little group to better

inform ourselves

to enable new MPs to play a greater role in parliamentary life?

Now the 1922 general election took place in November of that year, so very late.

So MPs newly returned, they started to gather and the group got together under Jervais

Rent to all the MP for the lowest of.

In April, 1923, so that's when it was founded, but took the name from the fact it is the members

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