Steve Baker

Steven John Baker (born 6 June 1971) is a British politician serving as Minister of State for Northern Ireland since 2022 and Minister of State at the Cabinet Office since 2024.

He is a former Royal Air Force engineer, consultant and bank worker.

Baker was born on 6 June 1971 in St Austell, one of two children.

He was educated at Poltair School in St Austell and St Austell Sixth Form College followed by the University of Southampton where he gained a BEng in Aerospace Engineering.

He later studied at St Cross College, Oxford, where he earned an MSc in Computation.

On 3 September 1989, Baker joined the Royal Air Force as an engineer and became an Engineering Officer, with the rank of pilot officer, on 15 July 1992.

He was promoted to flying officer in 1993 and flight lieutenant in 1996.

Baker retired from the RAF on 1 August 1999 as a flight lieutenant at his own request.

He later worked as a consulting software engineer and manager.

He was head of client services with DecisionSoft Ltd (now named CoreFiling) in Oxford from 2000 to 2001.

Baker has worked as a Unix system administrator.

He has been principal of Ambriel Consulting Ltd since 2001.

He was appointed as Chief Technical Officer at BASDA Ltd, Great Missenden in 2002, a position he held until 2007.

For a year from 2005 he was director of product development at CoreFiling Ltd. He was the chief architect of global financing and asset service platforms at Lehman Brothers from 2006 to 2008.

Baker was selected as the Conservative candidate for Wycombe on 31 October 2009, after former Conservative MP Paul Goodman stood down.

He was elected and held the seat for the Conservative Party, winning 48.6% of the vote and a majority of 9,560.

A member of the Conservative Party, he has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wycombe in Buckinghamshire since 2010.

Baker was rated as one of the Conservatives' top 10 most rebellious MPs of the 2010 intake.

He was nominated as a 'Newcomer of the Year' on ConservativeHome.

In 2010, in a series of parliamentary questions, Baker asked the Work and Pensions Secretary: "If he will bring forward proposals to distinguish the white form of asbestos and the blue and brown forms of that substance", also questioning: "If he will commission an inquiry into the appropriateness of the health and safety precautions in force in respect of asbestos cement."

He was named as the most authoritative Member of Parliament on Twitter in January 2011.

In March 2011, Baker initiated an adjournment debate alleging a malicious prosecution of an operator of an independent mental health unit.

The Solicitor General Edward Garnier issued an apology.

That year, Baker attracted controversy after he was one of three Conservative MPs who went on a luxury trip to Equatorial Guinea, funded by the Government of the state, via a trust based in Malta.

They reported at the end of the trip that human rights violations in the country were "trivial", in contrast to Amnesty International, which had reported repeated incidents of torture in the country.

Baker has campaigned for banking reform, calling for banks to re-adopt Generally Accepted Accounting Practice to account for devalued loans, as well as failed ones; in May 2011, he calculated that the use of IFRS instead of GAAP over-stated the strength of Royal Bank of Scotland's balance sheet by £25bn.

He introduced a Ten Minute Rule bill to 'bring casino banking into the light', by changing rules by which banks account for derivatives.

He was elected to the executive of the 1922 Committee on 16 May 2012, saying he was 'fed up with factionalism' and wanted 'to stand as neither a modernising 301 candidate or a traditionalist'.

In June 2015 he became co-chair of Conservatives for Britain, a campaigning organisation formed of Eurosceptic MPs. He co-founded The Cobden Centre and is a former member of its advisory board.

He established and chairs the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Economics, Money and Banking.

At the 2015 general election, Baker was re-elected, increasing his share of the vote to 51.4% and increasing his majority to 14,856.

Baker was shortlisted for the Grassroot Diplomat Initiative Award in 2015 for the founding of the Cobden Centre, and remains in the directory of the Grassroot Diplomat Who's Who publication.

Baker was the chair of the European Research Group (ERG) from 2016 to 2017 and from 2019 to 2020.

He was chair of the ERG, a pro-Brexit group of Conservative MPs, from 20 November 2016 until his promotion to ministerial office at the Department for Exiting the European Union on 13 June 2017, but resigned from his office on 9 July 2018 following the resignation of David Davis over concerns with the government's strategy on Brexit.

That same day, Jacob Rees-Mogg appointed Baker as the deputy chair and de facto whip of the ERG, alongside Mark Francois.

In late 2021, Baker announced the campaign group Conservative Way Forward will be relaunched in 2022, with him as its new chairman.

In 2017, the Unite Union raised concerns that Baker had lobbied for the deregulation of white asbestos.

At the snap 2017 general election, Baker was again re-elected, seeing his share of the vote decrease to 50% and his majority decrease to 6,578.

In February 2018, as a minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union, Baker was forced to apologise after inaccurately claiming that civil servants had deliberately produced negative economic models to influence policy.

Answering questions in the House of Commons, Baker confirmed a claim by the Eurosceptic backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg that Charles Grant, the Director of the Centre for European Reform, had reported that Treasury officials "had deliberately developed a model to show that all options other than staying in the customs union were bad, and that officials intended to use this to influence policy".