The leaks were made possible by one of the most surprising developments in British politics in recent years: the enthusiastic adoption by MPs of WhatsApp as a communications tool. While government ministers complain about the consequences of the encrypted app’s popularity for national security and law enforcement, it has become immensely popular across Westminster. So quickly did it become a central feature of political organising that some users appear to have given little thought to the pitfalls of conducting parliamentary business on a messaging app.

Led since January by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the ERG adopted WhatsApp after the 2016 referendum as a tool for supporting its parliamentary and media campaigning — to share research and articles, disseminate “lines to take” for media interviews, and arrange meetings. The group chat’s membership swelled to around 100 MPs, which allowed the ERG’s leaders to communicate with a large chunk of the Conservative party quickly and cheaply. But it meant that intimate conversations that were once held in private offices and parliament’s tea rooms, free from scrutiny, were now put down in writing in view of dozens of MPs and, potentially, their staff.





The ERG has done more than any group outside cabinet to shape the UK’s approach to withdrawing from the EU, exerting more influence over 10 Downing Street than the Tory Remainers, the leading business lobbyists, and the official opposition. With around 70 supporters on the back benches and at least a dozen more in ministerial roles or the whips’ office, it has the numbers to dictate terms to the prime minister — and potentially to bring down her government if they decide she is no longer committed to their vision of Brexit.



BuzzFeed News contacted several of the ERG’s leaders inviting them to comment on this story, but they did not respond.

Despite being the dominant force in the Conservative party, the leaked WhatsApp conversations reveal that some ERG members have grown increasingly anxious as the Brexit negotiations progressed since last summer.

The ERG’s most active members are zealous and determined, the messages show; they may not be the burn-it-all-to-the-ground extremists portrayed by Soubry, but they’re convinced of the righteousness of their cause and willing to take on anyone who isn’t committed to their post-Brexit vision — including journalists, mainstream economists, civil servants, central bankers, and politicians wearing the same party colours.

But the years spent in the political wilderness, when they were scorned as noisy obsessives pursuing a marginal cause, left a mark. And so they’re jumpy about the possibility of Brexit not turning out how they want it to.

At several points in the last eight months, the chats show, Eurosceptics have expressed alarm at concessions in the Brexit negotiations, worrying that it will be interpreted by voters as a betrayal of the referendum. One striking example came in September, when May gave a keynote speech in Florence.

Philip Davies, the MP for Shipley, in West Yorkshire, warned colleagues that their constituents would punish them if EU citizens continued to move freely to the UK during a transitional phase after Brexit. He even appeared to compare the concession to Britain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

“We will be wiped out in the local elections next May,” Davies wrote. “We have rewarded the EU for their intransigence. It is pathetic to be frank — a modern day [Neville] Chamberlain.”

