Baker brought in a new MP, Michael Tomlinson, as his deputy while Suella Fernandes and Anne-Marie Trevelyan became vice chairmen. Every Monday Baker met with the ‘steering group’ of Paleosceptic veterans – Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin, John Redwood, Peter Lilley and Iain Duncan Smith among them – who had led them into the battles over the Maastricht Treaty twenty-five years earlier. ‘Without them nothing moves,’ an ERG source said. ‘With them everything starts shaking and quaking.’ Soon, Baker had a WhatsApp group with eighty Tory MPs signed up and awaiting instructions.
