Steve Baker is choosing his words carefully. I’ve just asked the former Brexit minister if he’s planning to submit a letter to the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs calling for a no-confidence vote in Boris Johnson.
“No. There is no question whatsoever of me putting my letter in,” he says. But then he tells me to take note of the tense. One reason why there might be no possibility of him submitting a letter in the future is that he has already done so.
We are speaking minutes before Baker made his explosive speech in the House of Commons on Thursday, calling for the Prime Minister to realise “the gig’s up”. I can feel his nervous energy vibrating as he tries out some of his speech on me on his way to the chamber. He knows what’s at stake. He’s about to tell his fellow MPs that removing a sitting prime minister is “an extremely grave matter” that “tends to untether history”.
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On Tuesday, Johnson apologised in Parliament after the Metropolitan Police found that he had broken Covid lockdown rules and issued him with a fixed penalty notice. At that point he appeared to have Baker’s backing.
“You couldn’t have asked for a more humble and contrite apology,” says the MP for Wycombe, who won his seat in 2010. “The problem is the contrition didn’t last much longer than it took to get out of the headmaster’s study. By the time we got to the 1922 Committee meeting that evening it was the usual festival of bombast and orgy of adulation. It took me about 90 seconds to realise he wasn’t really remorseful.”
Given that he’s now come out against the Prime Minister, why doesn’t he also come clean on whether he has submitted his letter? Baker’s fingerprints were on the daggers protruding from the backs of the last two Conservative premiers. David Cameron decided to resign after the Leave campaign – in which Baker was instrumental – won the Brexit referendum. The former RAF officer then orchestrated serial rebellions against Theresa May.
When we met previously in his Parliamentary office back in January he spelt out why he was unwilling to participate in a third regicide. “I’ve been down this road before. Trying to remove a prime minister is a considerable personal and political burden. I’ve carried it once and I don’t wish to do so again.”
Today, the 50-year-old tells me, “I’m p—-d off with members of the Cabinet sitting there fat, dumb and happy and letting me do the dirty work in the trenches rather than take a risk with their own careers. It happened with Brexit, it happened with Covid and it’s happening again. I want the Cabinet to rise to this challenge. Sometimes leadership does require paying a personal price.”
Few politicians have wielded as much influence from the backbench as Baker. “I am not like all the other boys and girls I’m afraid,” he says. “I am a comprehensive kid and many of the unspoken rules about the way our system works, the way that loyalty to the party is supposed to work, the gradations of hierarchy, they’re all very public school. And I regard all this stuff – I’ll use the word though I don’t like to swear – as such b——-. And I’m willing to urinate all over their conventions.”
Baker backed Johnson primarily to ‘get Brexit done’. But he has increasingly become a thorn in the Government’s side over the lockdowns, Covid passports, increases in public spending and Partygate.
Johnson, he says, “dealt with Ukraine brilliantly. And this is the torment of following him. When it really counts on a major issue, he is capable of rising to the gravest of international challenges.
“But the vast majority of the expressed opinion in my constituency of Wycombe is fury. People lived under barbaric rules. They were told that if they deviated one iota from the law they would kill people. And they suffered for it. Meanwhile in Number 10, where they should have been obeying both the letter and spirit of the rules, clearly they breached both. It’s been a disaster and I fear we will reap the whirlwind on polling day.
“Boris is not a libertarian, he’s a bit of a libertine. I like going to prayers in the House of Commons every day. ‘May they never lead the nation wrongly, through the love of power, desire to please or unworthy ideals.’ That’s one of the lines. And I’m afraid that on two out of three of those Boris isn’t doing very well.”
Baker didn’t set out to be a rebel. “Unfortunately people keep doing things I disapprove of,” he says. “I’ve got a sort of ferocious resolve not to acquiesce in things which I know to be wrong.” He has a masters degree in computer science from Oxford – over the last decade he has, in a sense, been trying to hack British politics.
Back in July 2018, he was sitting in front of a bank of computer screens in the loft office of his constituency home in West Wycombe, wearing shorts and flip-flops, preparing to wage war against the Government. A self-described “introvert who doesn’t like conflict”, Baker plays either the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage or Verdi’s Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) when he needs to pump himself up. Either would have been apt on this occasion.
A few days earlier, Baker had joined Brexit minister David Davis and then foreign secretary Boris Johnson in resigning from the Government over Theresa May’s Chequers plan, which included the notorious “backstop” solution for the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Baker says he originally thought he would go quietly and admit defeat. But by the weekend a rebellion was gathering momentum and he was doing all he could to fan the flames by using social media and instant messaging apps to amplify the discontent among his fellow MPs. “I orchestrated so much of what was in the press that weekend. I went for it like hell,” he says.
Few politicians were quicker to embrace this digital statecraft than Baker. Among his most recent tweets is a video of him being thrown about in a mixed martial arts cage at a gym that was excluded from the Omicron Hospitality and Leisure Grant. “Imagine I’m the Chancellor. What would you do to Sunak?” he asks the gym’s owner, a split second before hitting the canvas.
One of the first glimpses of gathering discontent among Tory MPs came in December, when Baker removed culture secretary Nadine Dorries from his ‘Clean Global Brexit’ WhatsApp group of over 100 Tory MPs, after she described the Prime Minister as “a hero”.
“I am sick to death of self-interested sycophancy – court games – and that’s what I’m afraid she happened to be guilty of,” says Baker. “It disgusts me”.
Baker grew up in Cornwall, the son of a builder and an accounting clerk. He says he was a very introverted and bookish kid, who was always picked last for teams.
Despite being predominantly state school educated, he spent a “transformational” year at a prep school called St Michael’s near Barnstaple in North Devon on a scholarship, aged 11. “I was bullied and, when I look back on it, sexually harassed by older girls,” he says. “They tried to pull your shorts down and give you a squeeze. It was awful.”
Nevertheless, he loved that year. “It made me much more outgoing. And I learnt to stand up for myself.” After his return to state education, his parents divorced. “That still blights my life now, I don’t mind admitting. I can’t go home at Christmas,” he says.
After studying aerospace engineering at Southampton University, he joined the RAF as an engineering officer where he met his wife, Beth. He was bullied on his first two tours of duty. “I had to stand up to senior officers on both occasions. And you get to a point where you think: I just can’t be bothered with this.”
His time in the Armed Forces resulted in him developing an interest in adventure sports, including skydiving, sailing catamarans and riding motorbikes. Baker might not look like an adrenaline junkie but he has several hairy stories.
Once he was skydiving in the Algarve and deployed his main parachute only to find one of the steering toggles had jammed. “You’re spinning into a spiral dive. There’s only one drill. You look down. You grab the handle and deploy the reserve. And there it was: a lovely white parachute. I landed on a golf course. It was quite stylish. It felt like something from the movies,” he says.
“I’m not addicted to danger but I do think it’s important to live before you die,” he adds. This philosophy perhaps explains the vehemence with which he opposed the restrictions on daily life over the past two years.
His overriding concern is that the state should interfere as little in people’s lives as possible. Daniel Hannan, the Tory peer, once said that Baker is the only person he’d seen physically flinch at the thought of Government spending. This is the thread running through Baker’s opposition to the EU, blanket lockdowns and interventionist monetary policies like quantitative easing.
His critics have caricatured his political philosophy as rampant individualism or reheated Thatcherism, which he denies. Baker is pretty scathing about the state of modern politics in general. He thinks most politicians are happy to go along with the dominant orthodoxy and Parliament is stuffed full of “pragmatists who are not well read in even the basics of economics”.
Even his critics would find it difficult to question the vigour with which he pursues his goals. He’s been labelled the ‘Brexit hardman’ and ‘Rebel Commander’. Baker says he doesn’t like these nicknames, though he brings them up over the course of our conversation.
One commentator recently said you could gauge how bad things were for the Conservatives by how often Baker is in the press or on television. Some of the harshest insults have been hurled at him by those in his own party. In his Diaries, Sir Alan Duncan describes Baker as a “nutjob” who “should be taken away by the men in white coats and certified as clinically insane”.
Baker has no qualms about the damage he has wrought. The Cobden Centre, the think tank he founded following the financial crisis, is named after the 19th century English radical Richard Cobden, who led the campaign against the Corn Laws, splitting the Tory party in the process.
He describes his politics as “Christian libertarian… which is enough to alienate everyone in the room”. He wears a rubber bracelet on his left wrist inscribed with the first four words of a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito’, which translates as: ‘Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it.’
Some of Baker’s views are well outside the mainstream. He believes, for example, that central banks are complicit in state-managed economic growth that amounts to “monetary socialism” and should be disbanded. As he describes how the global monetary system is “basically a big confidence trick”.
He thinks the cost of living crisis is likely to lead to a crunch debate about fiscal and monetary policy. “High inflation plus rising interest rates is really going to add up to misery for millions of people. And the answer to it is, of course, free markets, strong property rights, sound money and low taxes. And the Conservative party’s gonna have to rediscover its capacity to deliver those things,” he says.
“I believe we’re heading for a bond market storm as a result of inflation rising and the Bank of England raising interest rates. Boris Johnson will face a choice between dramatically slashing spending or changing the Bank’s mandate.”
In 2020, the former chancellor Sajid Javid and the former treasury minister Lord O’Neill, in what Baker describes as “an obviously co-ordinated way”, called for the Bank of England’s inflation target to be scrapped in favour of nominal gross domestic product targeting. Baker is worried this idea will be adopted in order to keep the quantitative easing taps on.
“You can keep debasing the currency with money printing up to the point at which people start worrying you’re never going to stop, which is when the currency collapses. If the Prime Minister and the Treasury are daft enough to change over to a monetary system that allows money creation into an environment of higher inflation, we could destroy the currency. That’s what is on the table.”
At his Parliamentary assessment board Baker had to write an essay on why he was a Conservative. He’d just read Friedrich Hayek’s essay Why I am Not a Conservative. “I basically just regurgitated it onto the page. And they said to me: ‘That’s one of the best essays we’ve ever read!’”
Indeed, he voted Liberal Democrat in his first general election and only became a Eurosceptic after the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, which he describes as a “mortal sin”. As a Christian, he has no issues with shared sovereignty and as a classical liberal, he’s all in favour of free movement of goods and people. For him, Brexit is first and foremost a question of democratic accountability.
“I always understood that there would be downsides and difficulties to leaving the EU. Much as I hate customs paperwork, much as I hate having to have rows about SPS [sanitary and phytosanitary] measures [on food imports] in Northern Ireland and all the rest of it, those rows are worth having in order to maintain the principle that the public get the government they vote for.”
It is that principle that drove him to become one of the of the so-called ‘Spartans’ – the 28 Tory MPs who voted against May’s Brexit deal on three occasions. But his refusal to compromise doesn’t mean he isn’t reflective. “I am filled with regret and lament that our country has ended up so bruised and divided. I didn’t like either [referendum] campaign very much. I particularly didn’t like the [Leave] bus [emblazoned with the promise to spend the £350m ‘sent to Brussels’ each week on the NHS] and I said so during the campaign, which was controversial. People seem to have forgotten that.”
He says the months-long guerilla war against May’s Chequers plan was particularly draining. “The whole business was appalling. I hope I never have to live through anything like it again.” The nadir came two days before the third meaningful vote on the deal when even the likes of Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg had switched allegiance and sided with the Government.
At a meeting of the 1922 Committee, May said she’d step down if the vote went through and other members of the eurosceptic European Research Group came under huge pressure to fall into line.
But if anything, Baker’s resolve was stiffened by the catcalls and threats. He gave a speech in which he said he was “consumed with a ferocious rage” and prepared to tear down Parliament and bulldoze the rubble into the Thames. One of those present, clearly with half an eye on posterity, recorded it. “You can hear my voice quaking with absolute wrath. I got a standing ovation from the room. I had people crying. That was the worst moment,” he says.
Baker is not yet ready to embrace the quiet life or the lucrative private sector jobs for which he says he’s been sounded out. Instead he’s planning to relaunch Conservative Way Forward, the pressure group of which Thatcher was founding president, in order to “redefine the terrain of Conservative politics”. He believes the Tories are currently too enamoured by populist policies and bereft of big ideas. He wants to correct the recent lurch towards the big government and champion more libertarian ideals.
“If I get this wrong, I’ll lose my seat. But if I get it right, and I can sell it in Wycombe, then we can sell it to the country. And then we can succeed as a nation and perhaps set an example to the whole world.
“It’s typical of me; it’s the precipice moment, yeah? It’s the skydive, the catamaran with one hull out, the motorcycle. There’s all sorts I’d like to do in Wycombe with pavements, potholes, healthcare, schools, and ending food bank dependency. I want to do all that stuff. But, again, I’m afraid my curse is I’ve got this mind that expands to bigger horizons.”
