Brodie, a wealthy nabob and close friend of Henry Dundas, had an electoral stake in a number of Scottish constituencies. He stood for Cromarty in 1790, when Nairnshire did not return a Member, but could do no more than use the threat of litigation to force his successful opponent to agree to vacate after four years. He was provided with a seat for Elgin Burghs by Dundas’s intervention with Lord Findlater, who operated an alternating system of nomination with Lord Kintore. He regarded the seat as ‘temporary accommodation’, which he was ready to surrender whenever Dundas wished, but no changes were made in the 1790 Parliament and in 1796 he was again returned for the burghs by Kintore, at Dundas’s request.
Brodie remained loyal to Dundas, to whom he confessed in 1794 that any political influence he possessed ‘derived from being your protégé’, and was rewarded with a generous share of patronage.
In 1806 Brodie was urged by his brother and Lord Melville to contest Nairnshire against Lord Cawdor’s interest. He was tempted to comply, but a late shift in the electoral situation, which opened the prospect of ‘a personal canvass and exertions of a nature which I am now incapable of making’, caused him to abandon the idea and ‘to court repose as the chief blessing I can now look for’.
In 1813 Brodie’s daughter married the future 5th Duke of Gordon. Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus later wrote:
She made him very happy, and paid his most pressing debts, that is her father did ... who either for himself or somebody for him had had the good sense to send him with a pen to a counting-house instead of with a sword to the battle-field. He made a really large fortune; he gave with his daughter ... one hundred thousand pounds down, and left her more than another at his death.
Mems. of a Highland Lady ed. Lady Strachey, 253.
Brodie died 15 Jan. 1818.