The Telegraph headline this morning will be a source of bewilderment, not least for Tory MPs. It claims the prime minister now believes the WA he negotiated and signed last year "never made sense.". This will come as a surprise to the MPs who were forced to sign a pledge saying they would support the deal before being allowed to stand as candidates in the general election. It is a measure of how bizarre things have become under Boris Johnson that he is still in office this morning.
The amazing thing for me is how desperately Tory MPs fought to prevent parliament (a) scrutinising the bill putting the WA into law properly and, perhaps more importantly (b) voting on the deal itself. They insisted the government alone had the power to agree and sign international treaties and should not be 'fettered' by parliament.
Now, the first and only international treaty so far that Johnson was responsible for apparently 'never made sense' and needs renegotiating because of "unforeseen" problems.
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This is on the eve of the eighth round of talks starting in London this morning where our chief negotiator Lord Frost is telling the EU they need "more realism." You could not make this up.
The FT's scoop at the weekend about the Internal Market bill due to be published tomorrow and said to "undermine" the WA will be interesting. George Peretz QC has a nice explainer on Twitter about the problem of the NI protocol and its clash with the internal market legislation.
Important here to hold on to two critical points. https://t.co/W0QPXLHthT— George Peretz QC (@GeorgePeretzQC) September 7, 2020
The WA is an international treaty with specific provisions in article 4 which states that the UK shall "disapply inconsistent domestic provisions through domestic primary legislation". So, it doesn't matter what or how much law the UK government passes it cannot override the WA. British courts would uphold the WA in any legal judgement, unless....
The courts could disapply the WA IF the legislation out tomorrow tells them in clear and specific terms that sections of the UK Internal Market bill are to supersede or override provisions of the WA. But, and here's the problem, it would also be a breach of the WA writ large and would probably cause a diplomatic incident. Not to mention trashing our reputation as a trustworthy partner on the international stage. I don't expect that to happen. But it will no doubt cause a few eyebrows to be raised and questions asked.
The old saying that an Englishman's word is his bond was never less true than it is now. Even after signing a 440 page treaty we can't be trusted.
Last night on Newsnight we had Martin Howe QC of Brexit for Britain, Lawyers for Brexit and various other pro-Brexit groups as per usual, blaming the EU for the WA problems and for the impasse in the trade talks. He even put the blame on them for "compressing" the talks!
Among other things he echoed David Frost about the EU not recognising the UK's new found "sovereignty" and speaking as if the EU did not also have sovereignty. What Howe finds irksome is that the EU27 are doing their level best to protect and advance their own interests. This is what happens in international negotiations and invariably the stronger side comes out on top.
The weaker party has most to lose and must therefore make the most concessions. This has been going on for several thousand years with and without violence and wars.
The EU was and still is, an attempt to avoid all that and to work together to make the world a better, safer, cleaner and more prosperous place but not at the expense of weaker nations. This is a hard lesson for Brexiteers to learn but many of them will - eventually.
