Brexit minister suggests civil servants conspiring against government

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the current chairman of the ERG, asked Mr Baker in the Commons on Thursday if he had heard a claim from Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform think tank, that “officials in the Treasury have 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”. Mr Baker said that Mr Rees-Mogg’s account was “essentially correct”, although he said he could not confirm that civil servants had deliberately skewed data. Mr Grant later disputed the account of his remarks, saying that he had told a lunch meeting that Treasury officials favoured a soft Brexit but had not suggested that their data modelling was influenced by that view.

“I recall saying to Steve Baker at a Prospect lunch at the Conservative Party Conference that I was aware of research that the Treasury had done. This apparently showed that the economic benefits of the UK forging free trade agreements with third countries outside the EU were significantly less than the economic costs of leaving the customs union. I did not say or imply that the Treasury had deliberately developed a model to show that all non-customs union options were bad, with the intention to influence policy,” Mr Grant said.