Theresa May has presided over a “cloak and dagger” plot to undermine Brexit, in a move that will “blow apart” public trust in democracy, the Prime Minister’s former Brexit minister has told The Telegraph.

Steve Baker, who quit the Government along with his boss, David Davis, last Sunday, says he resigned after discovering that for months an “establishment elite” had secretly been pursuing a plan for a much softer Brexit than the one on which he and Mr Davis had been working.

The move effectively rendered the Brexit department a “Potemkin structure to [distract from] what the Cabinet Office Europe unit was doing for the Prime Minister,” he adds.