[citation needed] McGrath is a former political strategist who worked with Lynton Crosby on Boris Johnson's successful 2008 London mayoral campaign and on the Maldivian Democratic Party's 2008 presidential election victory.

In 2014, his first speech consisted of calling for the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rate to rise to 15 percent, the abolition of federal education and healthcare, youth radio station Triple J and ABC to be privatised, and defending people's right to say "hurtful and bigoted and stupid and dumb things.

[10] During the Channel 7 election coverage, Australian radio broadcaster Alan Jones engaged McGrath in a heated debate.

Jones accused McGrath of being ‘too panicked’ and taking the LNP down the path of Labor by supporting Turnbull.

[14] McGrath was reported to have had the support of senior Queensland cabinet ministers Peter Dutton and David Littleproud, and his 212–101 victory was seen as a rebuke of the LNP's insurgent 'Christian Right' factional grouping.

[2][16] McGrath was asked if the election of Johnson as mayor might trigger a 'mass exodus of older Caribbean migrants' and replied that 'let them go if they don't like it here'.

[17][18] The sheet, organised by McGrath included information on politicians sex lives, sexual promiscuity, drinking habits, health matters and family breakdowns.

[17] In July 2018, Senator McGrath was photographed alongside a group of Young LNP members with some making the "OK" hand gesture which has been come to be seen as a white supremacist symbol.

The picture depicted a dead and mangled cockatoo in the roof rack of a vehicle, presumably Senator McGrath's.