Baker, defeated at Hertford in 1784, joined the Whig Club as a founder member that year, a few months after being admitted to Brooks’s Club. He may have looked out for a seat before the election of 1790, but he did not find one and he was again defeated at Hertford. Nothing daunted, he stood for the county and after a four-day canvass defeated the ministerial candidate Hale, exposing him as a stooge of Lords Salisbury and Grimston. His friend Edmund Burke, who considered Baker’s absence from Parliament as ‘an evil’, wrote (25 June):
I met you in your state militant in pulvere et in sole; let me now congratulate you on your state triumphant, which has been so well earned by your virtues, talents, and exertions. Hertfordshire has done itself infinite honour: it will redeem Hampshire and London.
Burke Corresp. vi. 120.
As a Member, Baker was ‘conscientious ... active and attentive’.
Baker became a member of the Friends of the People and defended their aim of parliamentary reform in the House, 30 Apr. 1792, acting as chairman of their committee to promote it, 5 May. Two days before, he had objected in debate to the Westminster police bill because it added to crown patronage. On 25 May he described the royal proclamation against sedition as unnecessary, but thought it might do some good: a temperate reform of Parliament would curb disaffection. Then on 4 June, he and four other prominent Friends of the People resigned because of the admission of Major John Cartwright to their counsels. The associators were said to be ‘particularly enraged against Baker, who they say has always been in their cabinet, and to conciliate whom they have moderated all their late advertisements’. His silence prevented a fracas.
As with you, so here, those only feel a disposition, for it amounts to little more, to complain of my conduct whose views on political matters, especially in matters of reform, reach far beyond the ideas which any reasonable man can be justified in adopting.
Add. 37914, f. 51.
Although he was horrified at the excesses of the French revolution, Baker did not at first part company with Fox: he voted with him against the address, 13 Dec. 1792, supported Sheridan’s amendment to the aliens bill, 31 Dec., and voted against war with France, 18 Feb. and 17 June 1793. A bid to add him to the committee on commercial credit was defeated, 26 Apr., and he voted for parliamentary reform on Grey’s motion, 7 May 1793. But in his speeches he was more conciliatory to ministers: for instance, he was a critic of the managers of Warren Hastings’s trial and was placed on the select committee to review it, 28 May 1793. The Duke of Portland had queried whether Baker was a political follower of his in December 1792 and, although he was on Windham’s provisional list of recruits for his ‘third party’ and thought highly of him, he was not recruited in February 1793. In the session of 1794 he supported opposition on the transportation of the radical Palmer, 24 Feb., on peace negotiations, 6 Mar., on the call for indemnification of the employment of foreign troops, 14 Mar., on the militia augmentation bill and Lafayette’s plight, 17 Mar., on voluntary contributions to the war effort, 28 Mar., on the taxation of placemen and pensioners, 8 Apr., on the enlistment of French émigrés, 11, 16 Apr., and against the subsidy to Prussia, 2 May. He opposed the bill to enable contractors to sit in Parliament, 12 May. But on 17 May he supported the conspiracy bill, regretting ‘his being under the necessity of differing upon the present occasion from those with whom, upon other occasions, he felt it his happiness to coincide’.
The ensuing junction of Portland with government weaned Baker from the Foxites and the only issue on which he clashed with ministers before the dissolution was the Prince of Wales’s debts, June 1795. He was now ‘the Duke of Portland’s man’, supporting his efforts to curb sedition, and, after carrying a loyal address from the county, secured the adoption of the bill for the King’s safety for life, instead of for three years, 30 Nov. 1795, speaking ‘with great ability and effect’. He was listed ‘pro’ by the Treasury and there were rumours of an Irish peerage for him—quite unfounded.
Baker survived a contest directed against him by an embittered radical in 1796. He showed his independence by voting for a committee of inquiry into the Bank stoppage, 1 Mar. 1797, and into the French landing in Ireland, 3 Mar.; and joined opposition on the motions for adding Fox to the public accounts committee and for public economy, 13 Mar. He was himself a member of the former committee, reporting to it in the next two sessions on the tax office and on the civil government of Scotland and thereafter taking an interest in public accounting.
Baker’s conduct lost him his seat in the election of 1802, when he remonstrated against a ‘most preposterous coalition’ of aristocrats and Jacobins to oust him. He had no intention of sitting for a ‘rotten borough’ and despised the ministry. He obtained his revenge in 1805 when, on a vacancy, he regained the seat after a contest. The resumption of hostilities with France had, he felt, vindicated him.
The ministry would have liked to keep Baker out of the next Parliament, but his opponents could not agree on a junction and one of them withdrew, leaving him secure, but without any goodwill towards him.
In principle, he was a Whig; but when the situation of the country appeared critical, and danger was dreaded both from abroad and at home, he withdrew from that party, and strengthened as much as was in his power the arm of the executive government. This conduct was not infrequently censured, but we believe that Mr Baker never reaped any personal advantage from the part he then took.
Gent. Mag. (1824), i. 183.
As one of the more conspicuous country gentlemen in the House, Baker was ‘one of those people who with a great deal of zeal and good intentions in general, has not the advantage of a very right-headed judgment’.