We are in the rarefied setting of a private members’ club on Pall Mall in central London. All around us glasses clink, crockery clatters and people chatter – the dining room din of a slew of working lunches. In the middle of it all a hush descends on our table for two: Steve Baker is quietly crying.
The former Tory MP and government minister, who lost his seat in Britain’s July election, isn’t exactly sobbing. But his face is crumpled with emotion, his voice cracking beyond any pretence of composure. With tear-filled eyes he looks up from the table, a picture of vulnerability in contrast with the image that he has struggled to shake off as the “hard man of Brexit”.
“You can see I mean it,” whispers Baker, who was minister of state for Northern Ireland and before that, the leader of a hardline group of Brexiteer rebels. We had been discussing Ireland and how it got bruised during the Brexit saga, but now our lunch is going cold.
“I am embarrassed that Ireland was treated the way it was by the United Kingdom. It was wrong. God knows over our history Ireland has been treated badly by the UK. It’s f**king shaming,” he says, regaining his poise.
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Baker is the Tory politician who stunned Irish officials by apologising onstage at his party’s 2022 conference for some of Britain’s behaviour towards the State during negotiations for Brexit, of which he was a chief architect. The move helped thaw then-icy relations across the Irish Sea.
“I was really sincere in that apology. But Brexiteers were having a go at me because I was apologising for something that Leo Varadkar had also been party to making worse.”
Baker says the former taoiseach had been a “bloody nuisance along with [former tánaiste and minister for Foreign Affairs] Simon Coveney” during Brexit, for their stubbornness over the Border.
“Their predecessor [Enda Kenny] said the Border was just a technical and administrative problem. He was saying it, I was saying it – it was true. [But] Leo and Simon were instinctively doing political things that made [a deal] impossible, playing up to an Irish domestic audience and EU higher-ups.”
Baker, who was first appointed to his Northern Ireland role by Liz Truss, says he planned the surprise apology to break the deadlock. The only person he told in advance was Chris Heaton-Harris, then his superior as Northern Ireland secretary, and that was only in the minutes before they walked onstage.
“I remember his face – he looked at me agog. It had to be a hard Brexiteer who made that apology.”
I am reconciled with Irish political leaders, although there will be plenty in Ireland who still hate my guts
His plan worked. A few months later, Truss’s successor Rishi Sunak finally ‘got Brexit done’ with the Windsor Framework amid a calmer Anglo-Irish atmosphere. Even Varadkar was conciliatory towards the British when he returned for his second stint as taoiseach, two months after Baker’s apology.
“I want to praise Leo now. It takes a big man or woman to change their approach. I’ve met him a few times since. I understand he’s a man of few words and I’m not bothered if we didn’t have much of an exchange. But I do feel I am reconciled with Irish political leaders, although there will be plenty in Ireland who still hate my guts.”
Due to loyalist resentment of him over the Windsor Framework, he says he would not return to the North unless he had close protection or could carry his own “sidearm”. He says: “I would not trust loyalists not to want me dead.”
Baker is unfailingly polite throughout our freewheeling two-hour conversation. He is also disarmingly direct, including about his resentment towards the Wycombe electorate who voted him out – “It’s awful being an MP. I was enslaved to 75,000 people. I don’t want to represent them.”
Yet beneath the veneer of calm self-assurance and ideological zeal, there is a sensitive, earnest side to Baker. He is open about the “vulnerability” in his character that he believes helps him to connect with individuals, especially those who are suffering. “I’m proud of it.”
Baker becomes visibly emotional about five times during our conversation. He wells up talking about his “best friend in politics”, an unnamed activist in unionism who won’t speak to him any more over his support for the Windsor Framework and its compromises regarding the North. “A man who I love like a brother – but he can’t forgive me. Well I forgive him. But bloody hell it hurts.”
He gets upset again discussing his respect for the people of Ireland, north and south. His voice also cracks as he discusses the prospect of getting involved with a property company that builds affordable long-term rental homes for people who struggle to get on the housing ladder. “Imagine getting to do that for people … ” he says, trailing off.
He gets upset again recalling a talk he gave to university students, who asked him if Brexit had been worth it. Baker’s wife was in the audience. “I couldn’t answer, I was welling up, because I knew what we had been through. So she told them yes, it was worth it.”
What Baker and his wife had “been through” was his mental breakdown, which came to a head in November 2021, brought on by the pressures of Britain’s internal Brexit wars and the pandemic.
“I’m completely fine now. I’m happy. Politics is a long series of experiences that cause you to learn. But it also broke me. I nearly died over it. It was awful, I did not enjoy it. But I only coped with it at all because I am the type of guy who actually can rejoice in being on the edge, in that moment.”
I really regret the depths of the relationship between [Theresa May] and me. But she never really gave a sh*t who I was and never wanted the trouble of having me around
Baker hails from a modest background in Cornwall, southwest England. He has said that he turned to God as a teenager during his parents’ divorce and was baptised in a full-body immersion in the sea at Porthpean Beach. He is open about his born-again Christian beliefs, but not pushy about them.
He joined Britain’s Royal Air Force as an engineer in 1989, serving for 10 years. After completing a master’s degree in computer science at Oxford, he worked in the software industry and in management, including a stint just before the crash with the doomed Lehman Brothers bank.
Somewhat like Declan Ganley in Ireland, Baker was originally an EU federalist who later became disillusioned with the bloc, especially over the Lisbon Treaty. He joined the Conservative Party in 2007 and was elected in 2010 to the House of Commons to represent Wycombe, 35 miles west of central London.
Soon he was prominent among the Tory Eurosceptics who harangued David Cameron into holding the 2016 Brexit referendum. Theresa May later made him a minister but he quit in 2018 in protest at her Chequers plan for a softer Brexit. In his guise as a leading member of the European Research Group [ERG] of Tory rebels, Baker eventually helped to bring May down in 2019.
“I really regret the depths of the relationship between her and me. But she never really gave a sh*t who I was and never wanted the trouble of having me around.”
A few months after her political downfall, Baker was seated at the same table as May at a wedding.
“I always want to be reconciled with everyone. It’s part of my Christian nature. She sat opposite me and we talked, and we buried the hatchet. It’s not personal. I like Theresa May. She’s a good and virtuous person with a great deal of personal resolve. If we’d had Boris [Johnson], for all his flaws, as PM for Brexit, and her as PM for Covid, we probably could have weighed in behind them both.”
Baker was a prominent sceptic of lockdowns during Covid, and during this time was seemingly not close to Johnson, who didn’t appoint him to the government. Truss brought him back when she replaced Johnson in 2022 and Baker stayed in his ministerial role under Sunak until the Tories’ election defeat by Labour in July. Does he miss politics and would he go back?
“Wash your mouth out. Why would I? It would be such a waste of my life now. I have held more power in my hands, literally in my mobile phone [as leader of the ERG bloc of rebels who terrified Tory leaders], than most members of the cabinet. It turns out people still want me on TV. The Irish Times still wants me in its pages. So I’m a made man in politics. I don’t need to be an MP any more.”
Would he like to be appointed to the House of Lords, and re-enter government in future from there?
“What would be the point of me going back to parliament to f**k around and be a parliamentary under secretary in the Lords? You can’t be a secretary of state. Cameron did it but he was an exception. You certainly can’t be prime minister. Why go back to be a junior minister? I’ve got better things to do with my life.”
You have to live a life that you can justify apart from faith. But as a Christian I am commanded to love everybody, even my enemies
He suggests he would only go back if a Tory election win was on the cards, and he was promised one of Britain’s great offices of state – chancellor, home secretary, foreign secretary or prime minister.
“And I don’t want to be chancellor unless you want me to do it properly, and that means monetary reform,” he says. Baker is a libertarian and a follower of the Austrian school of economics and laissez-faire capitalism. He believes that central banks have debased currencies and a crash is coming.
He suggests that if he had retained his seat in July, he might have launched a leadership bid for the Tory party, regardless of his avowed disdain for politics.
“If I’d won, it would have been horrible. I would have wanted it to be a success and my record in politics is not one where I am regarded as not having met my objectives. So I probably would have met my objectives, and then I would have been prime minister. And that would have been shit.”
Meanwhile, Baker has assembled a portfolio of private interests to keep him busy in his life after politics. He has been appointed as an adviser to Axiom, a venture capital firm for the Bitcoin industry. Along with London School of Economics behavioural scientist Paul Dolan, he has also cofounded the Provocation People, a corporate consultancy that helps firms battle groupthink.
Baker says he has also “shaken hands” on involvement in a hydropower project in Africa, although it still requires approval from Whitehall authorities. He also hopes to become involved with the housing company that made him well up.
“I want my life to be about working with people in a way they’re proud of,” he says.
“My Christianity is central to who I am. You have to live a life that you can justify apart from faith. But as a Christian I am commanded to love everybody, even my enemies.”
And even his Twitter trolls. “I tell them: I hope you find peace. Then I block them.”
Outside of work, Baker spends his time skydiving, sailing boats “violently fast” in big winds, riding his motorbike and climbing. “They all require courage – to live in an existential moment.”
