Tory Hard-Liner Would Jump From a Plane Before Backing Theresa May’s Deal
Prime Minister Theresa May is working with her arch-rival, the socialist opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, on a new plan.
(Bloomberg) -- When Steve Baker leaps from a plane at 15,000 feet, there’s just one thing on his mind.
“When you’re in freefall, all you think about is, ‘I’m in freefall, what have I got to do?’” said the skydiving enthusiast, former Brexit minister and Conservative Party member of Parliament for Wycombe.
Hurtling toward the earth at 120 miles per hour makes Baker happier than anything else he does. Perhaps that’s why the 47-year-old politician, who spent 12 years campaigning for Brexit, finds the prospect of falling out of the European Union without a deal so untroubling. He rides a motorcycle, used to race catamarans, and confesses to “probably” being an adrenalin junkie. “Most of my hobbies have in common moving through the air quickly.”
“Is it an edge moment?” he said, still talking about skydiving. “Yeah, it’s an edge moment and edge moments are scary, but the way to prepare for edge moments is to know what you’re doing and then do it positively.” Here he sees a parallel with Brexit. “That is basically the problem. The prime minister has not wanted to do the job, has done it recalcitrantly, has not really understood where she was going with it, and as a result it’s a horrible nightmare.”
The nightmare for Baker is that his vision of a clean break from the EU, restoring self-government to Britain, now looks set to crash. Prime Minister Theresa May is working with her arch-rival, the socialist opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, on a new plan after parliament rejected her deal three times. Corbyn wants to keep close ties to the bloc in the form of a permanent customs union. Baker and many other Tories can’t accept that.
The prospect of any kind of Brexit now seems uncertain, as pro-EU campaigners step up demands for a second U.K. referendum. May is negotiating an extension to the April 12 deadline for agreeing to the divorce terms, and the country could end up staying inside the EU for another year at least.
It’s hard to overstate the scale of the loss for euro-skeptic politicians such as Baker. He led the Conservative Party campaign to leave the EU in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. Back then, it seemed he had won.
A year after the seismic Leave vote, Baker entered the government as a junior minister to prepare the country for the hard reality of a no-deal split. But he resigned in July 2018 in protest at May’s decision to water down the so-called red lines she set for negotiations.
Since then Baker, a former military man, has marshaled an army of around 100 of his fellow euro-skeptic Tories in the European Research Group in a revolt against May’s blueprint. Now time’s up.
“This might well be the week where Parliament and the prime minister—there’s no getting away from it—betray the referendum result,” Baker said from his Westminster office on the top floor of an outbuilding annexed to an annex, where he was exiled after his resignation. “We are outnumbered.”
Baker insists it’s too early to declare his mission a failure, however. What he wants even more passionately than to leave the EU is to restore democracy from the “profound crisis” in political representation that he sees corroding Western societies.
In one sense, the Brexit debate that overwhelmed British politics for the past three years has worsened the damage. The country is divided as deeply as ever, with politicians threatened with violence and targeted by angry protesters; hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets; and little room in public discourse for any other subjects. Baker says he deeply regrets that division and bitterness.
He’s not been immune from the worst forces it unleashed. Baker has received threats from people claiming they want to kill or injure him and has installed cameras at his home. “One mistake I made was not seeing the level of fanaticism from the Remain side,” he said, adding he’s “not bothered” by the threats.
Baker’s prescription is love. He is a committed Christian and occasional lay preacher at his Baptist church and describes his faith as “the most important thing to me.” He was baptized by full immersion as a teenager in the sea off Cornwall. In 1994, he met his wife, Beth, a doctor, in the officers’ mess at the Royal Air Force base in Leeming, Yorkshire. “She came into the room and I fell in love,” he said.
Balancing the hope is fear. Baker said a Corbyn-led Labour Government would do immeasurable damage to Britain. That’s why he—and, he says, thousands of party members around the country—are so appalled that May is reaching out to Corbyn to get her unpopular deal through Parliament with Labour votes.
Yet Baker and his fellow pro-Brexit MPs are hamstrung by a failed attempt to depose May in December. They must now wait until the end of this year to have another go. Their only option in the meantime is to undermine the entire government by backing a no-confidence motion that Corbyn could propose. But he won’t do that, because he doesn’t think May would do the decent thing and quit if she lost.
“I’m just really not convinced the prime minister would go if she lost a confidence motion,” Baker said. “She would probably stay and dare us to vote against a second time, causing a general election. This, I’m afraid, is verging towards tyranny.”
The best Baker can hope for is that May goes sooner rather than later this year, ceding to a new leader who could deliver his vision of a true Brexit. Potential candidates to succeed her are now preparing their campaigns.
Baker has a warning for them: He and the party membership won’t back any of the current cabinet members, because they’ve supported May’s deal, he said. He named former Brexit secretaries David Davis and Dominic Raab, the former foreign secretary Boris Johnson and former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey as the only acceptable candidates. All are pro-Brexit campaigners who quit May’s cabinet in protest.
Some Tory donors have approached Baker to set up a new euro-skeptic party. He said this would be “a waste of time” and is fighting for change from within. “We need people to stay in the Conservative Party and vote for a new leader.”
Whatever happens, Baker said his campaign for Brexit isn’t the hardest thing he’s done. That accolade goes to his hobby. “Learning to actually choose to throw yourself out of an aeroplane is hard,” he said. “It’s scary.” The first time you do it, “your mind just shuts down.”
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Sillitoe at psillitoe@bloomberg.net
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