Manoeuvrings of ideologically driven Tory MP may yet bring down the PM or bring Britain closer to no-deal scenario

In 2015, a libertarian, religious thinktank, the American Principles Project, convened a symposium on monetary policy in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Robert Mercer, the US billionaire behind Cambridge Analytica, was reported to have paid for the event. The Conservative MP for Wycombe, Steve Baker was a star speaker, who declared the trip in his register of interests.

He would later become a Brexit minister – and is now the key figure coordinating the guerrilla war being waged by hardline Tories against Theresa May’s Chequers plan.

Back then, Baker was causing trouble for the world’s most senior bankers, who were meeting in a separate conference in the mountain resort.

Baker, 47, took to the stage and declared that the panjandrums up the road posed an existential threat to capitalism itself. “Central banks are the problem,” he said. In a 14-minute speech, he warned the world was in the grip of experiments in credit expansion and state management of economic growth, both of them “monetary socialism” and doomed to failure.

He wanted the global financial system to evolve to a free banking model, whereby the value of money would be determined by market forces alone, free from any intervention by the state or central banks.

Unfashionable ideas, boldly expressed, are something of a stock in trade for Baker, whose manoeuvrings may yet bring down the prime minister, or bring the UK closer to the no-deal Brexit that only the most ideological Eurosceptics would welcome.

But ideology is something that drives Baker. And one of his heroes was a man who split the Tory party – and left it in the wilderness and unable to form a government for a generation.

His speeches, interviews and own writings before and after he became an MP in 2010 illustrate the extent to which his political life has been shaped by radical libertarian ideals.

Born in 1971 and state-educated in Cornwall, Baker took a degree in aerospace systems engineering as an RAF cadet and served as an engineer officer in the Royal Air Force until 1999 (“to fight totalitarian communism”, he told Politico).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Baker (back) at an event in the Commons to launch a proposal by Economists for Free Trade for ‘a world trade deal’ in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

He then took a master’s degree in computer science and became a software engineer, initially working for small companies. It was two years’ work as a software architect for the financial services firm Lehman Brothers from 2006 to 2008 that would alter the trajectory of Baker’s life.

“One of the things I realised as a software engineer, asking the detailed questions,” Baker would later explain, “is that they didn’t really understand how the system worked, or what the implications of it were.”

Following the 2008 financial crash, he co-founded his own thinktank, the Cobden Centre, named after the 19th-century English radical Richard Cobden, who led the campaign to abolish the Corn Laws, overturning trade restrictions on grain but splitting the Tory party in the process.

He also began volunteering for the Centre for Social Justice, a rightwing thinktank founded by Iain Duncan Smith, and in 2010 was elected to parliament. At a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance the same year, he said: “I think the European Union needs to be wholly torn down.”

Though it was Euroscepticism that he said inspired him to seek political office, the subject of his maiden speech was, true to form, monetary policy. It is a theme he has repeatedly revisited throughout his early parliamentary career, championing the laissez-faire Austrian school of economics, and predicting a future with a free banking system, driven as much by new technologies as base metals.

He has placed his money where his mouth is, and recently reported a shareholding of over £70,000 in Glint Pay Ltd, an app for bartering in gold, on his parliamentary register of members’ interests.

Baker has other political interests – he visited Kashmir in 2012 (Wycombe has a large number of Kashmiri constituents). Outside parliament, he has an extraordinary array of hobbies; he has posted thousands of photographs on Flickr, rides motorcycles, enjoys sailing, and skydives.

A born-again Christian, Baker has said his faith is very important to him but has written of his acceptance that it is impossible to “eradicate abortion and related actions completely”.

Unfashionable and outside the political mainstream, he would likely have remained in the obscurity of the Tory backbenchers had events not quickly, and inexorably, turned his way.

Following the 2015 general election, he co-founded Conservatives for Britain, a group of 50 Tory MPs described by the Guardian as “the new bastards”, intent on putting pressure on David Cameron as he renegotiated the UK’s membership in the EU.

After Cameron announced the EU referendum, it was Baker who successfully headed off the possibility of it being posed as a “yes/no” question (“yes” typically enjoys an advantage) and secured a “remain/leave” question format, according to the political journalist Tim Shipman’s book Fall Out.

In late 2016, he became chairman of the European Research Group (ERG) – at a time when it had almost no public profile.

Baker was the man who instilled military discipline, organising a disparate group of MPs through a WhatsApp group, coordinating their media appearances and firing off public letters agitating for the government to take Britain out of the single market and customs union.

Behind the scenes, Baker’s ERG was also raising money. Most of it came from the taxpayer – MPs can claim £2,000 a year via their expenses. But private donations were funnelled into a second bank account, the existence of which was only discovered after a freedom of information request.

This revealed how parliament’s expenses watchdog had repeatedly written to the group to convey the concerns of MPs and members of the public that taxpayer funds were being misused for political campaigning.

The largest private donation of £10,000 came from a pro-Brexit businessman. But more intriguing was a £6,500 donation in December 2016 from the Constitutional Research Council.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Baker at his office in High Wycombe. Photograph: Darren Jack/REX/Shutterstock

The CRC is an “unincorporated association”, which paid £435,000, supposedly the largest donation in Northern Irish history, to the Democratic Unionist party for its own pro-Brexit campaign. The identities of the CRC’s backers have never been revealed.

In early 2016, following Cameron’s announcement of the EU referendum, Baker, by now a leading figure in the leave campaign, emailed pro-Brexit colleagues with an idea. He suggested creating multiple legal entities that could each spend £700,000 campaigning to leave the EU. “Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum,” Baker wrote. The plan was swiftly disavowed after critics warned it would be illegal.

Baker was appointed Brexit minister in 2017, but quit over May’s Chequers proposals, and has since closely associated himself with a push by an assortment of rightwing thinktanks to force a harder break from the EU.

In recent months, he has been ever-present at events designed to undermine his prime minister.

He spoke at the ERG launch of a report by Economists for Free Trade on the purported merits of a “world trade deal” (meaning no deal with the EU and trading on WTO terms). He also attended the launch by the Institute of Economic Affairs of its “Plan A+” proposal for the UK to “deliver the Brexit prize” through radical free trade deals and deep cuts to regulation with countries including the US.

Earlier this year, undercover journalists from the environmental NGO Greenpeace filmed the IEA’s director, Mark Littlewood, describing how the organisation was in “the Brexit influencing game” and explaining that he had facilitated meetings between the author of the Plan A+ report, Shanker Singham, and Baker.

Politicians in Westminster and Brussels may be growing increasingly alarmed at both the prospect and the potential ramifications of a collapse in the Brexit negotiations. For Baker, the priority remains to avert what he regards as an altogether more apocalyptic scenario: the collapse of capitalism itself.

His public statements are occasionally laden with a sense of doom, as well as a sense of mission that has pushed his party to the point of self-destruction.

He has written that “in truth, it is often hard to be optimistic when you have ‘taken the red pill’ of Austrian School economics”. In 2015, he told Politico that western economies were “on a catastrophic trajectory” and destined to face the same fate as debt-ridden Greece.