Jacob Rees-Mogg says he’s not interested in any ‘accidental’ toppling of prime ministers, but we know better

The ERG set out its second bit of ‘research’ in as many days, but the only research that counts is the stuff on how to get rid of Theresa May

At the third meeting in 24 hours of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “European Research Group”, the man himself was incredibly keen to stress that the “European Research Group is a research group”. So keen, in fact, that he said these exact words four times, which may be sufficient repetition for alternative conclusions to be drawn as to whether European research is in fact the principal interest of the European Research Group.

There are some people out there, you see, who think that the European Research Group is mainly just a bloc of hard Brexit MPs whose principal interest is in holding the prime minister ransom to get the hardest Brexit possible. These people think that MPs like Nadine Dorries or Andrea Jenkyns or Andrew Bridgen may not, in fact, be there just for the research.

I can offer only anecdotal evidence by way of context, but not so long ago, I attended a talk by representatives of the National Farmers Union. It did not begin with anyone feeling the need to make clear, several times over, that the National Farmers Union is a union for farmers. I also dimly recall an incident in my late teens, when a friend showed me a training manual from his first shift at PC World. At no point, to the best of my knowledge, was he expected to explain to shoppers that they had just entered a world of PCs.

There are some mitigating circumstances however. What hadn’t helped Mr Rees-Mogg’s cause was that details of one of these three meetings, the one that had happened in private, late on Tuesday night, had been leaked. And it turned out that the subject members of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group had been researching was the most effective way to get rid of the UK prime minister, which, being a purely domestic matter, should naturally be beyond the scope of a European Research Group.

Indeed, because How to Sack the Prime Minister is not a question of European Research, the group’s organiser, Steve Baker had been well within his rights, on Tuesday lunchtime, to angrily tell a journalist that he “doesn’t care who the prime minister is, he cares about the substance of the issue,” and the members of the European Research Group, including David Davis, Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Bill Cash and others, were well within their rights to applaud with great passion. (What also hadn’t helped Mr Baker’s cause at the time was that the “substance of the issue” was, and I do mean this, the most laughable piece of research in all the political history of this or any nation, but we’ll come on to that again shortly).

That, a short few hours later, in a room with no journalists or cameras, it turned out that the European Research Group did in fact care who the prime minister was, and to the extent that they were actually gaming out the various scenarios in which the prime minister could be changed for a different one, is not something you should read too much into.

Which is not to say you can’t read more into it than you can read into the research of the European Research Group, though it is improving. Tuesday’s research, on how the catastrophe of a “no-deal Brexit” could first be re-badged as a “World Trade Brexit” and then claimed to be worth “£1.1trn to the UK economy” was rejected within seconds by anyone not very obviously insane. Wednesday’s research, on how to solve the Northern Ireland border issue was less far fetched, and only mildly undermined by the fact their proposals have already been rejected by both the government and the European Union.

They’d learnt their lesson, in a way. They’d been made to look stupid on Tuesday, with research that was very obviously untrue, which was not a charge that could be levelled at Wednesday’s research.

In fact, Owen Paterson, the former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said in his short few words, “There’s nothing new in here.”

Which there wasn’t. As far as the European Research Group is concerned, the way to solve the Irish Border issue is to go back to Brussels and keep asking them to say yes to something they’ve already rejected. As this went on, Davis nodded sagely. He’d been doing this for almost two full years before quitting the government over their frankly short-sighted refusal to carry on doing the same.

Still, Paterson was on a roll. Traditionally, on such complex subjects as trade and customs, Paterson’s job is to pop up on the Today Programme and tell CEOs of multinational car manufacturers how they should be running their businesses. To tell them all of the wondrous opportunities he has created for them that, mystifyingly, they do not want.

This time it was Guinness’s turn to reap the benefits of the great Paterson wisdom on how Brexit is just one big opportunity they never asked for. Guinness has large breweries on both sides of the border. For some reason, the company is yet to request Mr Paterson take any role in organising anything in them.

At the end, the pesky media were still more interested in the research the European Research Group has been doing in private, not public. You know, the non-European stuff. “Today is about the Irish issue,” Mr Rees-Mogg demanded, by way of introduction to the sixth time he would say, “The European Research Group is a research group.”

The conclusions of its private research are obvious for all to see, by the way. The European Research Group just doesn’t have enough researchers to force the wider party to research itself a new leader. Theresa May might not have seen this research itself, but you can be sure she’s got the gist of it.