Steve Baker MP, who resigned from the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) after Secretary of State David Davis over Theresa May’s ultra-soft Brexit plan, has revealed that the whole department is a sham, and claimed the “establishment elite” are working to overturn the EU referendum.
Baker revealed that the Brexiteer-led department was a “Potemkin structure” devised in the wake of the referendum to provide a veneer of credibility to the Remain-supporting Prime Minister’s promise to deliver a clean Brexit from the European Union, its Single Market, and associated Free Movement regime — while the EU unit at May’s Cabinet Office, led by career bureaucrat and Soviet Union admirer Olly Robbins, undermined all of its work behind the scenes.
He claimed DExEU, which was nominally leading the Brexit negotiations, had been preparing an entirely different Brexit blueprint to the one unveiled by the Prime Minister at Chequers, and that Brexiteers had been victims of “a year’s worth of cloak and dagger to land us into the Chequers position” — with all the time which could have been spent preparing for a ‘No Deal scenario since June 2016 squandered, and May able to threaten the country with the prospect of “no Brexit at all”.
“I hope that the public’s eyes will be opened to what’s going on today,” Baker complained bitterly.
“An establishment elite who never accepted the fundamental right of the public to choose democratically their institutions, are working towards overturning them.”
The Wycombe MP expressed concern that people would abandon the Tories in response to these manoeuvres; that the party would suffer a “catastrophic split… that cannot be reconciled” as “Leave-supporting democrats flood out of the Conservative Party because of Chequers” — leaving the country facing the “cataclysm” of a Jeremy Corbyn premiership.
“This is not the way to leave the EU. We’ve ended up in a posture of supplication on our knees as we negotiate, and it’s pathetic,” he concluded.
“That’s the easy way to negotiate — go into a negotiation and just give your negotiating partner whatever they ask for. That’s capitulation.”