Hello and welcome to the political party.

Today's guest is Steve Baker.

I have wanted to get Steve on this show for years.

And I've asked him at various points.

We never made it happen.

Today we made it happen and I'm delighted.

Steve obviously was one of the leading lights of the Tory party in the Brexit years.

He was under Secretary of State for exiting the European Union under Theresa May's premiership.

He was chair of the European Research Group, Minister of State for Northern Ireland.

He was also at the Cabinet Office and was one of those people that around, certainly after the Brexit referendum and

until a Brexit agreement was reached, was really prominent and one of the more dominant members

of the sort of Eurosceptic clan. But it's really interesting hearing him talk about that and the effect it had on him and where he is ideologically. I mean, this is so wide

ranging. We talk about so many things about faith, life, the sorts of pursuits that he's drawn to

and why, and what he's doing with his time now. And he is still absolutely, there's certain people

who meet, not that they could take or

leave politics, but in a way once they're out of it, they don't think about it too much.

He obviously thinks about it all the time and he's really thinking about it on a grand scale.

He's set up a thing called Fighting for a Free Future.

You can go to Fighting for a Free Future.com. I've put a link in the show notes so you can click on that and you can see what he's doing there. There's a whole load of other things he's doing as well, but that's really interesting. And just how resistant he is to Farage. He obviously, he's got a lot of respect for people as individuals and we talk about where that comes from and we talk about faith, as I say. But he is someone who's still very much thinking about what the big changes to our society are, what the big changes to our politics are, and what they mean, and what the risks of these things are. And I think it's always interesting when you talk to someone who is still very much animated and is dedicating a lot of their headspace really

to sort of intellectualising this and figuring out what it all means. You don't have to agree

with them. I just think that they're different types of politicians and he's he's one of those

as well as being an absolute adrenaline junkie. But we come on to that. The political party's

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