The man chosen by The Slog’s predecessor nby in late 2008 as ‘the only MP in many a year to resign on a genuine point of principle’ has had a sort of revenge: the Mancunian Grammar School Boy Malcolm Brady today won the Chairmanship of the 1922 Committee. He will not have been David Cameron’s dream choice; but equally, he is not a latter-day Monday Club dinosaur either.

There’s more to my support for Brady than the fact that his background is similar to mine. My main admiration for the bloke is based on his conviction that good Grammar Schools did more to produce genuine social mobility in Britain than any of the Comprehensive and other misguided experiments tried by guilty Labour public schoolboys after 1964. For this is a belief I share, and the facts of history support it. The 1944 Butler Education Act allowed ordinary kids like me to get a free secondary education which was, at the time, the envy of the world – and then go on to a University education beyond even the dreams (let lone the means) of my parents.

Brady balked at having that Grammar School ideal scotched by a product of Eton, who could never in a million years have grasped its importance to those born deficient in the silver spoon. Now, after a dignified three years on the back benches of a confused Tory Party, he seems to me the embodiment of genuine one-nation Disraeli Toryism.

Hurrah for Graham Brady. The Slog predicts great things for this man.