Only go over the top if you have some chance of success. If it’s just a futile gesture, everyone will say how tough you are, but you’ll have weakened yourself for the next time – and that’s when it might really have mattered.
MICHAEL SPICER, European Research
Group founder, c. 1993
On a sweltering summer’s day in late June 2018, John Bolton arrived at a private meeting in London. There were no British officials to greet Donald Trump’s bellicose national security advisor, just a small welcoming party from the increasingly vocal pro-Brexit cadre of Conservative MPs, the European Research Group. Leading the delegation was the one-time Tory leader and former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith, who had first met his “good friend” Bolton more than a quarter of a century earlier.
The Eurosceptic backbenchers were agitated. Theresa May was due to unveil her Brexit plans at Chequers a few days later. The ERG was worried that Britain might not leave the customs union and single market – which could severely limit any future free trade deals, not least with the US. Bolton asked, “Is there any way we can help?”1
Over the course of an hour, Bolton reassured his British friends that Trump was an enthusiastic Brexit supporter. The president would soon prove his commitment publicly. Two weeks after the ERG’s meeting with Bolton, the US president caused a diplomatic incident during a visit to Britain when he told the Sun that May’s Chequers plans for a customs arrangement with the EU would “probably kill” a deal with the US.2 It was unusual for a president who so often showed little interest in the detail of major pieces of domestic legislation to take such a defined position on the prime minister’s proposal. Many Brexit supporters held up Trump’s comments as evidence of the need for a ‘clean break’ with Europe. Bolton would later say that Britain would be “first in line” for a trade deal with America if it left the European Union without a deal.
The ERG’s private discussion with John Bolton was not a one-off. As we have already seen – and will see in more detail in the coming chapters – a small group on the libertarian and Eurosceptic right of British politics has long looked to the United States for inspiration. These transatlantic connections grew and strengthened rapidly, away from the public view, in the years before and after the EU referendum. A network of pro-Brexit politicians, journalists and lobbyists pushed for Britain to move away from European regulation, and towards America. They deployed the same tools that had proved so successful inside the Beltway for decades: relentlessly on-message think tanks and academics funded by corporate donors; well-organised ‘astroturf’ groups designed to look like grassroots supporters; and, crucially, small, highly organised groups of influential politicians.
A few days after his meeting with Bolton, Iain Duncan Smith dismissed the conversation as a “friendly chat”. “Just because you’re in government doesn’t stop you talking with people you know and are friends with,” he told a BBC reporter, adding, “I’m not in government, I’m not able to direct the government.”3 But over the following months, Duncan Smith and his colleagues in the ERG would show themselves to be increasingly capable of directing the British government. The ERG would eventually force May’s Brexit deal off the table and the prime minister out of office, and pave the way for Boris Johnson. They would, for a time, become one of the most influential forces in British politics.
This is the story of how a fringe Conservative Party pressure group was transformed into a highly disciplined, secretive party within a party that changed the course of British politics – and how taxpayer money, anonymous private donations and a hidebound parliamentary system helped them do it.
*
The European Research Group began in the imagination of an idealistic Oxford undergraduate. It was the spring of 1993 and Daniel Hannan, who had been raised in Peru by British parents, was finishing a history degree at Oriel College. He was 22 and had a fondness for Aleister Crowley. Unlike the flamboyant occultist, who once described democracy as an “imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness”, Hannan believed that the biggest problem with British politics was that Britons did not have enough say over their own affairs.4
A few years earlier, he had set up a Eurosceptic student society called the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain. Hannan was particularly vexed by the Maastricht Bill that led to the creation of the European Union. In Oxford’s student union he quoted Aristotle, Shakespeare and William Pitt the Younger in tirades against deeper European integration. With his university days nearing an end, Hannan wrote to the 22 Conservative MPs who had rebelled against Maastricht, offering his services as a researcher. Around a dozen replied. The ERG was born, with Hannan as its first secretary.5
The ERG was not the only Eurosceptic organisation to emerge on the margins of the Conservative Party at that time. Traditionally, the Tories had been seen as the more pro-European of Britain’s two major parties. Ted Heath’s Conservative government brought Britain into the then European Economic Community. Margaret Thatcher was an early, vigorous supporter of the common market at a time when many senior Labour figures such as Tony Benn were wary of a “capitalist club” led from Brussels.
This changed through the 1980s as Labour began to embrace the vision of a ‘social Europe’. In September 1988, European Commission president Jacques Delors was given a standing ovation when he told delegates at the British Trades Union Congress in Bournemouth that Europe would guarantee workers’ rights.6
Twelve days later, prime minister Margaret Thatcher offered a withering riposte. In a now famous address at the College of Europe in Bruges, Thatcher complained bitterly that she had “not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”. It was a watershed moment in British relations with the European project. A once vocally Europhile prime minister was turning her face against Brussels.
Shortly afterwards another precocious Eurosceptic Oxford undergraduate, Patrick Robertson, set up the Bruges Group.7 By the middle of the 1990s, the Bruges Group’s membership would include more than 130 Tory MPs. Thatcher, by then out of office, was the first honorary president.
Opposition to Europe – and particularly the threat of federalism – was growing across the political right. Robertson convinced expatriate financier James Goldsmith to set up the Referendum Party, in 1994. Goldsmith had been a notorious corporate raider and bon vivant. During the 1970s, he often played poker with Lord Lucan, who would later vanish after killing his children’s nanny and trying to murder his wife, and spoke approvingly of a military coup to topple what he believed was a socialist conspiracy led by Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.8 Now the pugnacious tycoon put £20 million of his own fortune into Eurosceptic politics.
In 1997, Goldsmith’s self-explanatory party ran almost 550 general election candidates on a single issue. (Future Conservative home secretary Priti Patel was the Referendum Party’s press officer.) The party did badly but took Conservative votes in key seats. Most famously, Goldsmith himself ran against disgraced former Tory minister David Mellor in Putney. Mellor’s concession speech after losing his seat to Labour is worth watching on YouTube. He bellows at Goldsmith to “get back to Mexico knowing your attempt to buy the British political system has failed” while a wild-eyed Goldsmith grins maniacally and claps his hands, leading the crowd in a chant of “Out, Out, Out”.
Although Labour had swept into power with a thumping majority, Euroscepticism was stirring. Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who inherited a £284 million fortune from his father, later described the Referendum Party as a “rebel army” of valiant Brexiters who saved Britain.9 Historians have pointed to the Referendum Party as a catalyst for UKIP’s later success.
The European Research Group, by contrast, was a far less showy affair. Through the 1990s, a dozen or so Tory MPs met regularly to discuss European politics at breakfast meetings in the Attlee Room in the House of Commons. Guests included members of the Bruges Group, the libertarian pressure group the Freedom Association, and a young journalist named Michael Gove.10
The first chairman was Tory MP Michael Spicer. Educated in Vienna and at Cambridge, Spicer had been removed as a minister in 1990 over his opposition to the Exchange Rate Mechanism. He believed that the EU was fundamentally undemocratic, later comparing it with China and Russia.11 The real driving force, however, was Hannan. At the time, he was sharing a flat in Soho with future Conservative and UKIP MP Mark Reckless. The pair hung a huge Union Jack over the fire escape and threw parties. Destiny was calling. “Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking Dan was a young fogey,” Douglas Carswell, who credited Hannan with converting him to Euroscepticism, told the Guardian. “This was a radicalised streak of thinking.”12
Instead of radical Conservative change, British voters shifted to the pro-European New Labour. The challenge for the ERG and others became keeping the Eurosceptic debate alive. Hannan rallied around opposition to the proposed European single currency, which Tony Blair had praised. The ERG published a paper making the business case against the euro. Hannan helped set up the pressure group Business for Sterling to fight a widely expected referendum on joining the European currency – in the end, it never materialised.
Business for Sterling was in some ways a prototype for Vote Leave. Dominic Cummings was the campaign director, and below him were many of the same staff and supporters. The anti-euro campaign, however, also took pains to say it did not want to leave the EU. “I got involved initially in Business for Sterling,” one-time ERG member Guto Bebb told me. “I thought that Europe needed reform. I wanted a two-speed Europe, not Brexit.” In 2018, Bebb resigned as a Conservative minister to campaign for a second EU referendum.
In stark contrast to its very public presence in the years after the Brexit vote, the ERG flew almost entirely under the radar during Hannan’s tenure. Occasionally, its links with like-minded European movements did raise quizzical eyebrows. Jörg Haider, former leader of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, claimed that he had been in frequent contact with the group during the mid-1990s.13 In 1998, Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay told the House of Commons that he had received a mysterious package at his Westminster office addressed to the treasurer of the European Research Group. Inside were one hundred cheques and a Midland Bank paying-in book for an account in the name of the Danish Referendum Campaign Account.
“Someone is running a fund-raising exercise from the House for that group, which could bring the House into disrepute,” said MacKinlay.14 At the time, Hannan was still in charge of the ERG from Westminster. Two years later, the Danes rejected adopting the euro in a referendum, by 53 per cent to 47.
By then, Hannan had stepped down from the European Research Group to become a Conservative member of the European Parliament. Hannan railed against the “illiberal” and “Bonapartist” European project. He had always maintained that the goal of the ERG was reform. “From day one it was conciliatory, the idea was to build a consensus around a looser relationship with the EU,” he later said.
A former colleague describes Hannan’s agenda as far more radical. “He wanted to take the institutions down from the inside,” says Edward McMillan-Scott, a former Conservative MEP who served alongside Hannan in Brussels and Strasbourg before defecting to the Liberal Democrats in 2010. “He used to say, ‘I don’t want to do anything but get out of the European Union, and if possible break the European Union up.’”
In the European Parliament, Hannan aligned himself with right-wing politicians opposed to immigration and regulation. (A parliamentary group he led was ordered to return more than half a million euros after an investigation into its spending, which included a quarter of a million euros on a conference in Miami.15) Hannan was particularly obsessed with restoring the sovereignty he believed had been lost to Brussels. His incessant attacks on the European Court of Justice and the role of EU institutions in British life were later picked up by Nigel Farage and others who added a nationalist edge to Hannan’s rhetoric about sovereignty. When the Guardian published a long feature about Hannan in September 2016, the paper titled it “The man who brought you Brexit”.16
Through the early 2000s, there was little sign that the ERG would become anything more than a recondite backbench outfit. With Hannan away in Brussels, and with domestic politics dominated by a stridently pro-EU Labour party, Eurosceptics struggled to get attention. The ERG was run by a succession of less distinctive characters, the most noteworthy of them being Matthew Glanville, future brother-in-law of the future chair Jacob Rees-Mogg. (Glanville’s wife, Annunziata, became a Brexit Party MEP in May 2019 before leaving Nigel Farage’s party a few months later to advocate a Conservative vote in the general election.)
Guto Bebb was introduced to the ERG by his friend, then ERG chair Chris Heaton-Harris, shortly after becoming an MP in 2010. At the time, the group met around twice a term, often on the terrace at Westminster. “The European Research Group was exactly what it was. There was a lot of research,” recalls Bebb. “It was really good at going into detail of things like what was happening at the European Council. It was pretty nerdy. Which appealed to me.”
The group’s headcount hovered around 20 Conservative MPs and a handful of Eurosceptic peers. Members included a number of Tories who would later be branded as sell-outs for their opposition to a hard Brexit: John Bercow, Oliver Letwin, David Gauke.17 Their ethos was less ‘Brexit do or die’ and more ‘what do the latest reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy mean for British farming?’
Conservative Eurosceptics did have one notable success in these wilderness years: they convinced David Cameron to make his ill-fated pledge to give British voters a say on EU membership. Wary of the pressure from the increasingly organised right of his party, the prime minister’s 2015 general election manifesto committed to a referendum on Europe. When the Conservatives won an unpredicted majority, the ERG was ready. Bebb received a phone call from Heaton-Harris. His old friend asked if he would support a Leave vote. Bebb declined, and left the group. The ERG did not take a public position on Brexit, but it campaigned vigorously behind the scenes. Prominent members such as Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Iain Duncan Smith and Liam Fox joined Vote Leave.
After the shock result, the ERG quickly changed shape, emerging as a vocal and highly organised opponent of a soft exit from the EU, pushing the Tory party ever further to the right and, eventually, toppling Theresa May. Its members started to appear frequently on television, listed as ERG spokespeople. Supporters such as Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg were given key cabinet roles. None had been involved with the group before the referendum, said Bebb. “The ERG was taken over as an already existing vehicle. It morphed into a no-deal Brexit sect.”
In American politics, small, influential bands of Republican legislators have often acted as outriders. The Freedom Caucus, and others, have adroitly used the conventions of Capitol Hill to steer the GOP in their preferred direction. It turns out that something similar had been happening in Britain, too – led by a baby-faced, sky-diving Tory backbencher named Steve Baker.
*
If Daniel Hannan created the ERG, it was Steve Baker who moulded it into what the Economist has described as “the closest thing Britain has produced to sans-culottes”.18 Baker is easily underestimated. Slightly built, with a piercing stare and a keen eye for detail, the Conservative MP for Wycombe since 2010 can come across more like a zealot than a sharp political operator. He once said that the EU “needs to be wholly torn down”.19 But the former Royal Air Force engineer has a flair for organisation that would be the envy of any Leninist sect.
In September 2015, Baker led a successful rebellion over David Cameron’s proposals to loosen the strict ban on government institutions being involved in campaigning – known as ‘purdah’.20 What looked like a rather technical victory severely curtailed the prime minister’s ability to use the machine of government to push pro-EU messages in the crucial final month before the referendum.
Baker is often said to possess an innate understanding of the concerns that motivate grassroots conservatives. “Steve Baker is very good at talking to the Conservative mind,” remarked veteran Eurosceptic Roland Smith. “If you feel you are one cog in a historical enterprise that is the United Kingdom, he completely taps into that.” Daniel Hannan’s old friend Mark Reckless privately described the ERG as “a backwater with little real influence on policy till the arrival of Steve Baker”.21
Baker took over as ERG chairman in late 2016. On his watch, it mushroomed from a talking shop with a dozen active members into a well-drilled political machine that could persuade as many as a hundred MPs to toe the line. “They have their own leader, their own whip, MPs are furnished with what to think and what to ask. Nothing is ever made public. They don’t even say who is a member and who isn’t,” said one source close to the inner workings of the group.
Baker reorganised the ERG into an inner core comprising a handful of MPs, Eurosceptic Tory MEP Syed Kamall, peers such as David Owen and Nigel Lawson, and trade lobbyist Shanker Singham.22 The steering committee, chaired by veteran Eurosceptic Tory MP Bernard Jenkin and aided by former cabinet ministers such as Owen Paterson and Theresa Villiers, met weekly in Iain Duncan Smith’s parliamentary office to plan strategy. Notes were never taken. A much wider group of ERG ‘supporters’ was organised through a very active WhatsApp group, incongruously titled ‘ERG DExEU/DIT Suppt Group’.23
The ERG had one main aim: to ensure a hard, clean Brexit with a minimal role for the EU in British affairs and maximum flexibility to deregulate and sign free trade deals around the world.
The fervour with which Baker approached the task of leading the ERG mirrored other aspects of his life. He is a born-again Christian; baptised by full-body immersion off the coast of Cornwall, he has spoken of being guided by a higher power.24 He is also a committed disciple of the laissez-faire Austrian economics advocated by Thatcher and Reagan. Baker has called for the deregulation of carcinogenic white asbestos and has consistently argued for an end to the state’s involvement in the banking system.25
“The bail-out of the banks incensed him as being a flagrant abuse of power by one class of people over another. This was a key motivation, in my opinion, for him to go into politics,” says Toby Baxendale, who first met Baker a few years before he became an MP and has remained close to him ever since. In the EU, Baker also saw “an elite political class enriching itself as the expense of the poorest”, Baxendale told me.
Baker keeps a silver coin in his breast pocket26 to remind him of what he believes to be an impending financial collapse, and has advocated a return to the gold standard. (After the EU referendum he invested £70,000 in a company that urged people to buy gold as “insurance” against a no-deal Brexit. The firm later went into administration.27) This faith in monetarism brought him into the orbit of dark money-funded US conservative groups. In 2015, American Principles in Action paid for Baker to attend a conference on global finance in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The conservative think tank has received funding from Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers. Another libertarian outfit, the American Liberty Fund, picked up the tab for Baker’s attendance at similar events in Britain, Italy and the US.28
Baker has also spoken at the Antigua Forum in Guatemala. Billed as “the accelerator for freedom”, this invitation-only gathering has featured an unlikely smattering of libertarians from around the world. Guests have included a former advisor to Vladimir Putin credited with implementing Russia’s flat income tax, an Ivorian politician close to the country’s former president Laurent Gbagbo, who was once acquitted of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and staff from British free market think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Baker was also a member of the Freedom Association. When writer and comedian David Baddiel described the Freedom Association, set up in the 1970s by right-wing Tories vehemently opposed to trade unions and Irish Republicanism, as a “slightly posher version of the BNP” in a radio interview in 2011, Baker wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC.29 The broadcaster apologised.30
After the vote to leave the EU, Baker saw the ERG as a chance to shift Conservative Party policy from within. British politics has had pressure groups in its major parties for a long time. The Trotskyist Militant Tendency was a constant thorn in the side of Labour leaders before being purged in the 1980s. Alex Salmond was briefly expelled from the Scottish National Party for his membership of the 79 Group. The League of Empire Loyalists and the Monday Club kept a strain of imperial white supremacist nostalgia alive in the Conservative Party from the 1950s through the 1970s.
But rarely has a pressure group exerted as much influence on a governing party as the ERG. Conservative ministers and whips felt compelled to work with them. ERG members had advance notice of key decisions. The group was even given a private briefing before Theresa May delivered her key Lancaster House speech in January 2017, which committed to leaving the European Union’s single market and customs union. It was Eurosceptic red meat. As the prime minister would soon discover, the ERG would accept nothing less substantial.
When May lost her majority in June 2017 and needed to soften her stance to have any hope of getting a Brexit deal through a divided Parliament, she sought to pacify the ERG by bringing them into government. Steve Baker was made a junior minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU). In January 2018, Suella Braverman, Baker’s nominal successor as ERG chair, joined him in the increasingly powerless Brexit department. The archly reactionary investment banker Jacob Rees-Mogg became the public face of the ERG. May and her whips hoped that ministerial baubles would placate the Eurosceptics.
The plan backfired completely. Baker showed scant regard for ministerial rules and conventions and continued to effectively lead the ERG from inside government, organising briefings for the group and attending meetings in the Commons that were not recorded in his ministerial diary.31 When this was exposed, Baker faced no sanction. Instead he resigned in July 2018, saying that he had been “blindsided” by May’s Chequers proposals that would have seen Britain remain in a customs arrangement with the EU, limiting the scope for free trade deals.
Baker was replaced in DExEU by another ERGer, Chris Heaton-Harris. A few months earlier, Heaton-Harris had written to every British university demanding lists of academics who were teaching about Brexit.32 Steve Baker was soon followed out the ministerial door by Braverman and fellow ERG supporter Dominic Raab. Both resigned in November 2018 in protest at the withdrawal agreement that May negotiated with Brussels, based on her Chequers proposals. Far from neutralising the ERG’s threat, May had increased the ERG’s standing.
“[Conservative chief whip] Julian Smith and the other whips took the view that they could get the ERG to fall into line by bringing them into government,” says Bebb. “It simply didn’t work. It was a disaster.”
The ERG’s red line was trade. Trade had scarcely featured during the EU referendum, but in its aftermath it was often cited as the most compelling reason for Brexit. Britain had to be free to strike trade deals around the world. (The irony of leaving the world’s largest free trade block of near neighbours in the name of free trade with countries thousands of miles away was occasionally commented on.) As May’s withdrawal agreement, and the benighted Irish backstop, would have limited Britain’s ability to sign trade deals – particularly with the United States – the ERG opposed it implacably.
Baker, Jacob Rees-Mogg and other senior ERG figures secured a vote on the prime minister’s leadership under Conservative Party rules in December 2018. Although May survived, the ERG would soon effectively end her premiership. When Tory MP Anna Soubry resigned from the party in February 2019, she decried the ERG as “a party within a party” with “its own damaging agenda based on blind ideology”. One-time member Guto Bebb agrees. “There was never any intention to support May’s deal.”
The ERG’s fervent opposition – and tight whipping operation – ensured that May’s withdrawal agreement suffered two crushing defeats. The prime minister’s Brexit bill fell for a third time in March 2019, this time by 58 votes. Some senior ERG figures, including chair Jacob Rees-Mogg, did switch to support the government. But 28 ERG members – the so-called ‘Spartans’ led by Baker – voted against, as did the group’s close colleagues in the Democratic Unionist Party. Had these pro-Brexit factions supported the prime minister, her deal would have gone through. May later announced her intention to resign and was replaced by Boris Johnson, a late convert to Brexit.
The ERG, a party within a party born in Daniel Hannan’s student digs, had brought down a Conservative prime minister and changed the course of Britain’s most significant peacetime policy. And it had achieved this thanks to a little-used Westminster convention that effectively allowed MPs to set up powerful caucuses funded by taxpayer money.
*
Despite being formed in the early 1990s, the first time many people heard of the European Research Group was in early September 2017, when its then chair Suella Braverman appeared on Channel 4 News live from the lobby in the House of Commons. The ERG had started flexing its muscles publicly. The pressure group had circulated a letter warning Theresa May against signing a transitional deal with the EU that would keep the UK in the single market. Braverman, a junior government aide, trotted out familiar lines. “No deal is for sure better than a bad deal.” The prime minister must “do justice to Brexit”. But then news anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy changed the subject – to the ERG itself.
“Could you just explain to us what is the European Research Group,” Guru-Murthy asked, “because a lot of people are saying it is effectively a party within a party, it is a group of hardline Brexiteers, some of whom are government ministers operating within the Conservative Party and taking public money, because a lot of you use public money as MPs to fund this group, the ERG.”33
The inquisition seemed to catch Braverman off guard. Pressed about why the ERG’s membership was secret, the ERG chair struggled to answer. She would, she said, “definitely provide” a list. None was ever published. Already people were starting to ask who the ERG were, and why a partisan pressure group within Parliament was being underwritten by taxpayers.
Officially, the ERG is one of five parliamentary research services; the others are connected to the four largest political parties in the Commons: the Conservatives, Labour, the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats. The ERG is funded by MPs paying an annual subscription of £2,000 each, which they claim as an expense. Writing on openDemocracy right before Braverman’s appearance on Channel 4 News, veteran lobby journalist Jim Cusick detailed how more than 50 Conservative MPs had claimed subscription money from their expenses for ERG membership.34 At £2,000 each a year, this works out at around £340,000 in taxpayer money between 2010 and 2018.35
“The public purse has been underwriting the ERG’s so-called research for years,” says Cusick. “And for years nobody knew anything about it. It was hiding in plain sight.”
In theory, every time an MP claimed £2,000 from their expenses for an ERG subscription the information was publicly available. But it was veiled in secrecy. Many Tory MPs listed their ERG payments simply as “other pooled research” on their public record, rather than as donations to the European Research Group. “When I phoned Jacob Rees-Mogg’s office staff, they told me that he wasn’t a member of the ERG and he hadn’t contributed. Even though he was,” recalls Cusick.
The true extent of the ERG’s funding is likely to be far higher than a few hundred thousand pounds. Data for payments to the ERG only goes back to 2010, when MPs were forced to publish details of their spending for the first time in the wake of the expenses scandal. Prior to that, almost no information had been published about the ERG at all. The group also has a separate bank account for private donations.36
Taxpayer funding was crucial to the ERG’s success. It paid for the staff that oversaw the group’s transition from talking shop to well-drilled political force. In June 2015, committed Brexit supporter Christopher Howarth, son of long-term ERG member and former Tory defence minister Gerald Howarth, joined as a researcher. His arrival coincided with a pronounced change in ERG message discipline. Research briefings started to look more like public relations than analysis. Members were fed with statistics that supported leaving the European Union.
Whereas previously the ERG met at the occasional breakfast briefing, now they were in continual contact. The group’s constantly updated WhatsApp conversation provided briefings for its MPs before they did interviews, offered rapid rebuttals and agreed responses to breaking events. Senior members coordinated complaints to media that they felt had been negative about Brexit. After reviewing a tranche of ERG WhatsApp messages, Steven Barnett, a communications professor at the University of Westminster, told Buzzfeed that he had never seen a political movement “coordinated with such apparent dedication outside of an election campaign”.37
Detail of the ERG’s private funding is scant, but occasionally some scraps of information have fallen into the public domain. In 2014, the group’s then researcher Robert Broadhurst disclosed to Parliament that his salary was partly funded by private donations. One donor was Norman Lamont, the Eurosceptic former chancellor of the exchequer. Lamont, a member of the House of Lords, said that he remembered contributing “about £1,000” to Broadhurst’s pay. “I probably felt that it was wrong that I was not contributing, and MPs were,” he said.38
Lord Lamont also noted how the ERG had changed after the 2016 referendum. Whereas before it had, he said, largely consisted of “having breakfast once a month and hearing from Robert Broadhurst, and making up our own minds” and did not have a “collective policy”, after the Brexit vote it became “more of a sort of campaigning thing”.39
The strident Euroscepticism of the ERG’s post-referendum incarnation proved far more attractive to private donors. Paul Dyer, a pro-Brexit businessman, gave £10,000.40 The ERG also received cash from the Constitutional Research Council, the shadowy group behind the Democratic Unionist Party’s huge Brexit donation. In December 2016, the CRC gave £6,500 to then chair Steve Baker for an ERG Christmas party. It was the only other donation on record from the CRC.
By then, Baker’s Eurosceptic cadres had become increasingly close to key figures in the DUP. Nigel Dodds, the party’s Westminster leader, was a regular at ERG meetings. Former DUP Westminster chief of staff Christopher Montgomery joined the ERG staff, alongside Howarth. Like Dodds, Montgomery was a former Vote Leave board member. He had a long-standing personal relationship with the CRC’s chair Richard Cook, who was also a member of the ERG’s WhatsApp group. In December 2018, as Theresa May struggled against Eurosceptic opposition to her withdrawal agreement, Cook applauded Baker’s “outstanding leadership of Brexit” in the WhatsApp group.41 Baker was “a superstar in a parliament with too many political pygmies!” the Scottish businessman wrote.
Private money allowed the ERG to broaden its horizons. The group commissioned expensive private polling and drafted alternative proposals for the Irish border. Front groups such as StandUp4Brexit – coordinated by staff who worked for former Vote Leave chief technology officer Thomas Borwick – gave the appearance of a groundswell of popular support on social media for key ERG policies. Other similar ‘astroturf’ campaigns sprang up opposing Chequers and May’s withdrawal agreement. The ERG was even reported to be working with CTF Partners, the public relations firm run by Australian spin doctor Sir Lynton Crosby which ran the 2015 and 2017 Conservative general election campaigns, and which later donated money and staff to Boris Johnson’s successful Tory leadership bid.42
Just how much money the ERG raised from private donors is impossible to gauge. The European Research Group is an unincorporated association. Like Richard Cook’s similar Constitutional Research Council, it doesn’t have to publish accounts or list its members. This means it was able to exert an outsized influence on British politics with very little oversight or transparency about where its money came from.
The ERG had two bank accounts – one for private donations, the other for public funds. Asked about this arrangement in 2018, then chair Jacob Rees-Mogg said: “The research is publicly funded, but everything else isn’t and we’ve always been very careful to differentiate and make sure anything that isn’t justifiably a public and parliamentary expense is dealt with separately.”
Westminster has a regulator that oversees how taxpayer-funded parliamentary groups like the ERG operate. But the watchdog seems to take a very curious view of what the public should be told about how its money is spent.
*
In January 2018, Jenna Corderoy, my colleague at openDemocracy, wrote an email to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). Citing the Freedom of Information Act, Corderoy asked the parliamentary watchdog for copies of research submitted to it by the ERG. IPSA had been set up in a hurry in 2009, as the MPs expenses scandal rocked Westminster. Amid a seemingly endless drip feed of stories about taxpayer-funded second homes and bath plugs charged to the public purse, the Labour government announced that it was establishing a watchdog to monitor MPs’ spending. For the first time, expenses would be scrutinised and published. Part of the remit of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority was to oversee research services funded by MPs’ expenses – like the European Research Group.
For years, IPSA had taken a very light-touch approach to the ERG. It asked few, if any, questions. In 2017, however, as press attention intensified on the ERG’s increasingly public Brexit lobbying, the regulator wrote to the group saying that it wanted reassurance that public money was not being misspent on party political campaigning. In response, the ERG sent the regulator samples of its publicly funded research output.
Although Freedom of Information is often used by journalists, the law allows anyone to request information from a public body. A decent rule of thumb for FOI is that if the information has been paid for by taxpayers, then you should have a right to access it. The parliamentary watchdog took a different view. Releasing the documents it had received from the ERG could damage its relationship with the group, IPSA said in response to the request.
Corderoy, one of Britain’s most experienced FOI journalists, was undeterred. She appealed to the Information Commissioner’s Office, whose job it is to adjudicate on access to information. The timid regulator upheld the original judgment that research funded by taxpayer money should stay private. She appealed once again.
In early May 2019, Corderoy walked into a drab central London court where an information rights tribunal was being heard to decide her case. She was 29 and representing herself. Wearing black jeans, a white shirt and a pair of shiny Doc Martens, Corderoy was the only one not in a suit. Over many months, she had fought the case in her spare time, reading previous judgments, constructing skeleton arguments. She told the court that the public must have access to the ERG’s research “in order to understand what kind of research these MPs have relied upon to mould their views on Brexit. And for history’s sake, we must be able to access these materials to understand how we have got to the point where a no-deal Brexit is a very real possibility.” The judges agreed.
Dozens of ERG briefings were released. Most were quite short and read more like talking points than research. There were lines for MPs to take on key Brexit issues. ERG notes frequently accused the Conservative government – of which the ERG’s MPs were members – of failing to “address the positives” and “distorting statistics”.43 Reports by business groups were dismissed as false forecasts. Post-Brexit job losses should be described as jobs that would no longer be needed for EU migrants. IPSA had found that one briefing – which attacked the Labour Party for voting against a Brexit bill – had crossed the line into party politics, but on the whole the ERG’s output was, the regulator said, “factual and informative”.
Independent trade experts came to a very different conclusion. The ERG’s research was “superficial and selective”, said former UK trade official David Henig. The British taxpayer had spent a small fortune underwriting a highly political party within a party, and the regulator had fought tooth and nail to prevent any of its work from being released to the public.
It had taken Corderoy a year and a half, and countless hours of work, to force Parliament’s putative watchdog to hand over basic information. Her experience is far from unique. British government departments refuse to comply in full with more than half the Freedom of Information requests that they receive.44
I have lost count of the number of times I have asked for documents from ministerial meetings, only to be told that none exist. No minutes were taken. No notes were kept. Increasingly, there is no paper trail for crucial decisions.
Laws supposed to make government more open have had the opposite effect. Supposedly publicly accessible information, such as the register of MPs’ interests, is so poorly presented as to be almost unusable. Freedom of Information, the legislation that led to the MPs’ expenses scandal, “doesn’t work properly”, transparency campaigner Tamasin Cave told me. Government departments routinely obfuscate. Regulators err on the side of institutions, not the public that they are supposed to protect. “The system is broken, and nobody intends to fix it,” said Cave. “In all the windows of government, the curtains have been closed.”
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The success of the ERG demonstrated how a small, disciplined pressure group could pull British politics in directions that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. The parliamentary convention for funding pooled research services provided an ideal vehicle for a committed band of ideologues, with the public picking up the tab. Anonymous private funding and a constant stream of WhatsApp messages helped the ERG to push their agenda even more effectively. Without all this, Britain would almost certainly have left the European Union as planned at the end of March 2019 with the agreement negotiated by Theresa May.
Politically, the ERG often found itself outmanoeuvred. The attempt to unseat May in late 2018 was a tactical disaster, at least initially. The group’s epitaph was written countless times. Yet when Boris Johnson unveiled his first cabinet in July 2019, the European Research Group was at the top table. Dominic Raab was back, this time as foreign secretary. Priti Patel was given the key home office role. Jacob Rees-Mogg became leader of the House of Commons. Steve Baker took up the chair of the ERG again, a role he had never really left. Johnson’s strident determination to leave the European Union “do or die” could have come from a taxpayer-funded ERG briefing note. In October 2019, the ERG conspicuously backed the prime minister’s proposed withdrawal agreement.
Johnson’s hastily rewritten text was almost a carbon copy of May’s original, except in one crucial respect: by acquiescing to bespoke arrangements for Northern Ireland, it would leave Britain free to sign trade deals around the world. The ERG threw their former comrades the Democratic Unionists under the bus. “I would ask the DUP to accept this compromise,” Steve Baker pleaded on BBC Radio 4. The DUP said “never”. In January 2020, Johnson’s withdrawal agreement passed the Commons with the enthusiastic backing of the ERG. The DUP voted against, but it didn’t matter.
So why was the ERG so opposed to Theresa May’s deal but so supportive of Boris Johnson’s? The group’s motivations were often discussed on late-night talk shows and in the pages of political magazines. Sovereignty. Identity. A dash of xenophobic Little Englandism. But when I asked former member Guto Bebb what drove the ERG he gave me a one-word answer: “deregulation”. May’s agreement would have bound Britain to continental standards that many in the ERG wanted to see loosened. Johnson’s kept alive the ERG’s vision of a deregulated “Global Britain”.
Daniel Hannan frequently talked of post-Brexit Britain imitating Singapore’s low-tax, low-regulation economy. “The ERG is Singapore on steroids,” says Guto Bebb, adding that many in the group were “climate change deniers” who “were quite happy to see Trump win”. Another Tory MP, Tom Tugendhat, said that the ERG represented a corruption of British Conservativism: “It is rampant libertarianism. It’s the very opposite of what it means to be a Conservative.”
Tugendhat’s point is a crucial one. The ERG did not just provide a home for fervent Brexiters; it was also the first really cohesive pressure group inside the Commons since Thatcher that strongly identified with American libertarianism. During the long years of arguing over Brexit, the ERG was the most vocal proponent of prioritising a trade deal with the United States. ERG top brass frequently travelled across America spreading their message to receptive audiences. Boris Johnson’s sweeping victory in December 2019 meant that the ERG no longer held the balance of power, but by then it didn’t matter. The hardliners’ job had already been done.
As Tea Party-aligned caucuses had done on Capitol Hill, the ERG had successfully used the machinery of British party politics and funding to push their radical Brexit agenda. And they were not the only ones dreaming of a new transatlantic alliance.