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		</div><p>The threshold for triggering the no-confidence vote in Theresa May was reached twice in one day, the chairman of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee has disclosed.</p>
<p>Sir Graham Brady said he received the 48th letter from a Tory MP calling for a confidence vote on Tuesday morning last week – only for, moments later, another MP to withdraw the letter they had submitted some time earlier.</p>
<p>Writing in Parliament’s The House magazine, Sir Graham, who never revealed the number of letters he was holding, said a third MP came to him later in the day with their letter, finally tipping the tally over the crucial 48 mark.</p>
<p>Under party rules, the chairman of the ’22 is required to stage a confidence vote in the party leader if 15% of the parliamentary party write to him calling for one.</p>
<p>Sir Graham described how, after weeks of speculation that a vote was about to be triggered, the drama unfolded when he bumped into a Conservative MP in one of the corridors of the Palace of Westminster.</p>
<p><em>“’I’m really sorry Graham, I didn’t want to do this, but I just can’t leave it any longer’. A House of Commons envelope travelled from his inside jacket pocket to mine in a matter of seconds. Unseen, the trigger had been pulled,” Sir Graham wrote.</em></p>
<p><em>“Lots of people have congratulated me on my poker face recently but never had it been more important that I remain impassive: any sign that this was a critical moment would have changed the whole dynamic of the process, so I bade the colleague farewell and walked quickly back to my office in Portcullis House.</em></p>
<p><em>“The door had barely closed when there was a knock on it. Standing there was a Conservative MP who had submitted a letter to me a couple of weeks before. ‘The timing is just bloody awful, I’d like to withdraw my letter’, they said. Back to 47.</em></p>
<p><em>“It was too early for a large whisky – or even a small one – so I just sat down and shook my head in disbelief.”</em></p>
<p>He said that it was the second time within a month that the total had reached 47. On the previous occasion the “tide had ebbed rapidly down the beach” as other MPs withdrew their letters.</p>
<p><em>“Would this happen again? No, in the afternoon the threshold was crossed again. This time it was going to be for real,”</em> he wrote.</p>
<p>With the Prime Minister out of the country on a whistlestop tour of European capitals, Sir Graham telephoned Downing Street to arrange a meeting.</p>
<p>By early evening Westminster was “buzzing” with rumors that the threshold for a vote had been reached.</p>
<p><em>“I have done everything possible to ensure that this process was handled properly, I am confident that my office doesn’t leak,”</em> he wrote.</p>
<p><em>“But someone did, could it have been someone within the Government machine who didn’t have the Prime Minister’s best interests at heart?”</em></p>
<p>In the event, Mrs May survived the vote – held the following day – although more than a third of her MPs voted for her to go.</p>
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