The Tory leadership was warned today that David Cameron had "lit a fuse" after he rushed through a vote to end an 80-year tradition in which backbench Tory MPs have held a formal weekly meeting.

The prime minister was accused of launching a clumsy operation to block the election of a rebel former frontbencher, Graham Brady, as chairman of the 1922 committee after staging a short election on Wednesday night to allow ministers to attend its meetings.

Cameron won the vote today when 168 of the party's 305 MPs voted in favour of the change, which will also allow ministers to vote for the committee's officers. But 118 MPs voted against the change.

In an article for the Conservativehome website, Paul Goodman, a former frontbencher, estimated that more backbenchers voted against Cameron, on the basis that the 76 Tory ministers would have voted for the change if they had been able to. This means that an estimated 92 backbenchers are likely to have voted on the leadership's side compared with 118 who voted no.

Rebel backbenchers have considered a "2010 committee" to act as a new voice. But the weight of opinion is running against this. "If we set up a 2010 committee we might be drawn into a trap," one MP said. "But David Cameron has lit a fuse. It will go off at some point in the future, when there are clouds over Westminster, and Cameron will regret his decision."

MPs accused Cameron of bouncing the change on them without any notice to try to block the election of Brady, a former shadow Europe minister, as the 1922 committee's chairman. Brady is seen as something of a folk hero on the right after he resigned from the frontbench in 2007 during the row over grammar schools.

The change could boost the chances of Richard Ottaway, a veteran moderate MP, who would be more supportive of the leadership. But MPs may be emboldened to vote for Brady to register their unease.

Goodman warned that the leadership may regret its hasty decision to weaken the power of backbenchers, who were a source of grief for John Major when he had a wafer-thin majority from 1992-97. "A week ago, Cameron retained the goodwill of most of his MPs, despite failing to win the election outright and forming a coalition with an opposing party – on what many of them regarded as dubious terms," Goodman wrote. "Much of that goodwill has vanished since yesterday, driven out by resentment, grievance and anger. Tory MPs not usually prone to excitement are citing their leader in the same sentence as Kim Il Sung and Robert Mugabe."

One senior MP said: "This is a very clumsily executed move that has split the party. A lot of re-elected MPs are astonished and deeply offended. Is this just a clumsy attempt to stop the election of Graham Brady as chairman of the 1922 committee? The sensible way to defuse this would be to say that ministers will absent themselves for the election to the executive."

One rightwinger was scathing. "We have a war in Afghanistan, the economy is on the racks and we have a formal coalition agreement. Yet the prime minister found an hour in his busy diary to speak to us not on those three important matters but on the minutiae of gerrymandering a decades-old constitutional arrangement in the Tory party."

MPs on the right were deeply offended when Cameron highlighted the need for change by singling out Sir Nicholas Winterton, who retired at the election. The prime minister said that Winterton talked about "you", rather than "we".

Cameron defended the change. "I am asking a very sensible and serious question," he said. "I think it is much better to have one organisation in the party which has one mind and, to coin a phrase, we are all in it together."