Born in Montreal, Quebec, to a wealthy family, he was a nephew of artist Prudence Heward of the Beaver Hall Group, and wrote a chapter about her in the 1996 book Portraits of a Life.
His father, Major Arthur Grafftey, was a First World War hero and board chairman of the Montreal Lumber Company.
Due to his relatively short stature and impish looks, Grafftey earned the nickname of "The Gnome from Brome," during his twenty years in politics.
Grafftey sat as a Tory MP until losing his seat when the Liberal Party under Pierre Trudeau won the 1968 election in a landslide.
Like many of the other challengers in the race who were eliminated in the early ballots, Grafftey supported the eventual leadership winner, Joe Clark.
After suffering a serious injury which incapacitated him for most of the campaign, he came in third place behind the Bloc Québécois challenger and Liberal incumbent MP Denis Paradis.
In 2002, he was one of the first Progressive Conservatives to call openly for Joe Clark, who had returned as Tory leader in 1998, to resign, offering himself as a replacement.
[3] He ran a campaign that was devoid of defining policy proposals but which focused upon his political experience, his bilingualism and his belief that he could recruit 300,000 new members to help the PCs win the coming election.
Grafftey's candidacy received some media attention largely because he was the only candidate in the race who was fluently bilingual (in English and French) and had experience in governing.
After the 2003 convention, Grafftey briefly re-entered the political spotlight by joining Orchard and other former Tories in opposition to a proposed merger of the party with the Canadian Alliance.
In 2001, he wrote a book on the state of Canadian politics entitled Democracy Challenged: How to End One-Party Rule in Canada.
Grafftey declared his sexual orientation when he disrupted and stormed out of a service at St. George's Anglican Church in Montreal after the priest delivered what he considered a homophobic sermon.