A number of constituents have put questions to me about the constitutional propriety of the choice of the next prime minister being confined to the membership of one political party. Frankly, it is indeed questionable.

The constitutional position is that we are a parliamentary democracy and we do not elect the prime minister. Rather, we elect members of parliament, and the PM holds office because she enjoys the support of a majority of those members of parliament.

Until relatively recently political parties confined to their own members of parliament the choice of who would lead them.
The advantage of doing so is to ensure that the leader always has the confidence of his or her parliamentary party, and if that confidence is lost, then it can be swiftly remedied by a ballot confined to a small electorate.

The moment you extend the electorate beyond the parliamentary party you make the process more complex and lengthy, and more important, you run the risk of having a winner chosen by the wider membership who doesn’t actually enjoy the confidence and support of a majority within the parliamentary party.
This is exactly the position that the current Official Opposition is in. Jeremy Corbyn was elected by a very wide definition of Labour Party membership which included registered Labour supporters, all on the basis of reforms implemented under his predecessor Ed Miliband, which further diluted the influence of MPs. The result is that it takes a relatively long time to arrange such a contest, and it has delivered a party led by Mr Corbyn, to the dismay of a majority of the MPs who sit on the Labour benches behind him.
When those MPs voted that they had no confidence in him, it made no difference because they no longer had ownership of the office.

The Conservative Party came rather late to the concept of ‘democratising’ the party leadership. It was only under reforms implemented by William Hague that the ballot for leader was extended beyond MPs to the party membership. I opposed the reform for the simple reason that the Leader should have the confidence of the parliamentary party, and therefore should be the choice only of the parliamentary party.
The system that Hague designed ensured that parliamentary ballots would narrow the choice to two candidates, and that the final choice between them would be put to the membership in a postal ballot.
Only two leadership elections have been conducted under the system: when Ian Duncan-Smith triumphed in 2001; and David Cameron in 2005. In the  contests of 2004 and 2016, the parliamentary party engineered the exclusion of the wider party membership by ensuring that only one candidate emerged from, or survived for more than a weekend after, the parliamentary ballot.

How a political party selects its leader is only of constitutional significance when it is in government.
If it is in opposition, a general election stands between its newly elected leader and political power.
When the party is already the party of government however, the choice of leader is also the choice of prime minister. If that choice is confined to MPs then I believe that the demands of constitutional propriety in a parliamentary democracy are satisfied. The extension of that choice however, to unelected members of just one political party undermines the principle of parliamentary democracy.

There is only one precedent for this: when Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair. The precedent doesn’t make it right.
We are now in the strange position where urgent and critical business faces the nation, whilst we take two-and-a half- month ‘breather’ to choose a party leader, who will become Prime Minister

…but for how long?

Surveying the wreckage of Theresa May’s premiership and the disastrous wipe-out of the Tory Party in the European Election it is difficult to underestimate the complete horlicks that has been made of BREXIT.

I don’t agree with most commentators however, that one of the PM’s biggest mistakes was to call an unnecessary election in 2017 in which she lost her parliamentary majority.
In my estimate her majority of only 15 was insufficient to negotiate terms with the EU from a position of strength; it was too small to guarantee getting Brexit legislation through the Commons; and she needed to overawe the huge Remain majority in the Lords.
Her mistake was not in calling the election, but in her handling of the election campaign, frankly I’d never experienced a worse one.

All her subsequent problems in the negotiations either stem from, or were exacerbated by, the weakness of her parliamentary position after the 2017 election.
Nevertheless, grave mistakes were made.
First, she began the negotiations under Article 50 of the EU Treaty before we were ready: she had not agreed with her cabinet what exactly it was that she was negotiating for (It wasn’t until the Autumn of 2018 that she secured their -somewhat reluctant- backing for a plan).
Consequently, the Government’s negotiations lacked coherence. The ministerial resignations from the Department of State for Exiting The EU are testimony to the fact that those ministers discovered that 10 Downing Street was negotiating quite separately and keeping them in the dark.

Second, She insisted that ‘no deal would be better than a bad deal’, but to sustain that position it would have been essential to have begun preparations for a no deal Brexit even before the Article 50 negotiations had started. Indeed, a proper analysis of all the necessary measures and the time it would take to implement them should have preceded the Article 50 process. Only then could the mantra ‘no deal better than a bad deal’ have been taken seriously by EU negotiators.

Third, and perhaps the biggest mistake, was to have accepted the EU’s demand for the sequencing of negotiations so that there could be no discussion of future trading arrangements until a financial settlement was agreed: never agree a price before you’ve seen the product.

Whether the Government can now recover the confidence of the nation under a new prime minister, it’s too soon to tell

I am aware that I repeat myself in this column, but then the main item on the nation’s the political agenda keeps repeating itself. We are shortly to debate and vote on the PM’s EU withdrawal agreement for the fourth time.
Furthermore, a significant number of my constituents repeat themselves persistently in the emails that they address to me, almost as if I hadn’t answered the point that they made in my last reply to them.
It’s happening again this week. A whole stack of people are emailing again to tell me to vote down Prime Minister’s “deal” so that we can leave the EU on World Trade Organisation terms.
So, I repeat: There is no ‘deal’: The PM has not negotiated one; the ‘deal’ doesn’t begin to be negotiated until we’ve actually left the EU.
What the PM has agreed (and now seeks parliament’s approval for the 4th time of asking) is the Withdrawal Agreement which merely covers the next 20 months or so after we’ve left the EU or until we have negotiated the real ‘deal’.
Whilst I have all sorts of reservations about the Withdrawal Agreement, it’s no good telling me it’s a rotten deal, because we haven’t got a deal yet. Who Knows, the deal, when we actually get it, might turn out to be mutually advantageous. Alternatively, be could end up being completely shafted. It’s a risk, but that negotiation lies ahead.
What my correspondents want is for us to avoid that risk by just leaving without any agreement and trading just on World Trade Organisation rules (of course, that involves a quite different set of risks).

Again, I repeat myself, I’ve said it to them before. On the balance of risks, I would indeed oblige my correspondents: voting down the agreement and leaving without an agreement if that choice was open to me, but it isn’t: The one thing that Parliament has found a majority for is that it will not approve leaving without an agreement. So I just cannot deliver what they are asking, no matter how much I might wish to.

I conclude that, on the balance of all the risks, the greatest is that we end up not leaving the EU at all. It is for that reason I will support the PM’s agreement with all its defects. Then, once outside the EU, we can join battle over the nature of the ‘deal’ that we then have to negotiate.

Every Couple of weeks the Police contact me to see if I have any ‘security concerns’.
I haven’t yet. I get some pretty frightful emails but they’re rare. Overwhelmingly, my correspondents can disagree politely and sensibly, no matter how outraged they are at the pace and direction of Brexit.
I know parliamentary colleagues who have been threatened with violence, but I had no such encounters.
On the contrary, people tend to sympathetic and understanding, I think they feel sorry for me having to endlessly repeat the same debate.
I think it was in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory that he observes that ‘pity’ is the supreme form of contempt!

I wonder if Gavin Williamson, sacked by the PM after accusations of leaking confidential discussions, ever reflects on what I told him in July 2016 when he came seeking my support for Mrs May’s leadership bid:  that he had taken leave of his senses and that, in my estimate, she’d be a disaster. (I had twice tried to persuade David Cameron to dispense with her services).
Once she became leader however, I began to re-appraise her. She was decisive, resolute, and said all the right things about BREXIT. It wasn’t until the general election campaign of 2017, that all my previous misgivings about her judgement and her style resurfaced.

It is true that she has been given the most difficult and controversial task of any post-war Prime Minister, and without a parliamentary majority with which to achieve it. She has shown extraordinary determination and resilience in the face of repeated setbacks.
Nevertheless, a complete horlicks has been made of the enterprise. The measure of it rubbed-in by last week’s screening of BBC’s BREXIT Behind Closed Doors.
The fact that we can even treat as credible the report that Olly Robbins, the PM’s trusted negotiator, asked Guy Verhofstadt -the BREXIT lead for the EU Parliament- if he could get a Belgian Passport after it’s all over, is a measure of our humiliation and the chaotic way in which the negotiations have been handled.

The PM assured Parliament over 100 times that we would leave the EU in March of this year. The failure to deliver that fundamental aim of policy must come with consequences.

Stay with me, this is complicated:
The principal difficulty with the PM’s withdrawal agreement is the ‘backstop’ which keeps in the UK in a form of limbo at the end of our transition period after leaving the EU, if a solution to the Irish border question has not been found.
Much work was done to identify such a solution in an exercise that came to be known as the ‘Malthouse Compromise’ and subsequently a parliamentary motion was passed known as the ‘Brady amendment’ which required the PM to return to the negotiations, re-open the withdrawal agreement and substitute the arrangements identified by the Malthouse compromise.
A great deal of effort was also put in to persuade the EU negotiators that the arrangements set out in the Malthouse Compromise were workable using existing procedures and technology. They must have been impressed because, when for a short while, it did appear that the UK might actually leave the EU in March without a deal, Mr Barnier announced that, even were that to happen, there wouldn’t be a hard border in Ireland because the EU would rely on ‘other arrangements’.

So what became of the parliamentary instruction that our negotiators re-open the agreement and substitute Malthouse for the backstop?
We discover from the EU Commission that the UK negotiators never even asked.

In June 2016 the British people voted to leave the EU, but in May 2017 they elected a parliament without a majority.

It was always going to be a very tall order for a hung parliament to accomplish the most controversial and complicated agenda in a generation. I am not surprised that, thus far, it has failed to do so.

After the drubbing that both the main parties have just taken in the local elections, It strikes me that there are three possibilities as to what happens next with Brexit:
First, nothing changes, and the parties take no notice of the evident frustration of the voters expressed in the results of last Thursdays polls, by continuing to reject every compromise, save only that they have voted to prevent departure from the EU without any agreement (which, perversely, appears to be the most popular option among voters -if my correspondence is any guide).

Second, that the EU loses patience and just throws us out at their next opportunity, Halloween.
I know that to many this is highly desirable, because it achieves the no-agreement outcome above, which Parliament has refused to deliver. In my estimate however, it is the most unlikely outcome: We are the EU’s second largest financial contributor, and all that money is surely worth the minor irritation of our continuing indecision.

Third, the Government, together with sufficient numbers of opposition MPs, encouraged by the sobering effect of the local election results, decide to unite around a compromise BREXIT.
This will involve a measure of re-alignment: some will brand it as ‘BREXIT in name only’ (BRINO) and peel off to join Farage’s BREXIT Party, whilst others, opposed to any departure without a further referendum,  will join the new Change Britain Party.

This third, and most likely of the possibilities, will involve leaving the EU politically whilst hanging on in there in some form economically. It is bound to mean some close accommodation with the EU customs union and internal market.
That isn’t what I want, or what I voted for, but in the hung parliament delivered by the voters in May 2017 it’s probably the best I can get.

The opportunity to leave the EU only comers round once every 46 years, I cannot allow it to be fumbled, and lost.
Could the British people live with it?
Some, like me, I would be disappointed, but I suspect they would shrug and continue with their busy lives and other priorities. After all, for years they used to say to me “we were hoodwinked in 1975, we were sold a ‘common market’ but it turned out to be a super- state”
Does that mean that, shorn of involvement in the super-state and its political institutions, they could live with the EU’s economics?

I’m not an enthusiast for pupils taking ‘strike action’ at school, after all, it might become habit- forming.
Equally, it will have been miserable if you were one of the thousands of drivers that got stuck in traffic jams caused by Extinction Rebellion.
Nevertheless, the climate change debate has taken centre stage for a few days – despite BREXIT.

The UK was first country to introduce legally binding long-term emissions targets under our landmark Climate Change Act in 2008. The act requires us to achieve a 57% reduction in emissions by 2032 from the levels in 1990. So far, we’ve cut 42% at the same time as the economy grew by over 70%:  So, we’ve decarbonised our economy at a faster rate than any other rich country. The last time the UKs emissions were this low was in 1890.
 

If we are to meet our latest target of at least 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 however, then we are going to have to raise our game still further. In response the Government has set out a comprehensive plan for the whole economy in the Clean Growth Strategy published in October 2017.

The publication of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has raised the question as to whether any of this is nearly enough, and consequently the Government is now awaiting advice this week from the Committee on Climate Change on how to move to a ‘Net-Zero’ emissions target.
Last week Opposition MPs were demanding a guarantee to implement these recommendations -whatever they may be. I think it’s more sensible to wait just a few more days and see what the recommendations actually are, then think how we can implement them effectively. 

I was told that the total of all our emissions going back to 1900 are equivalent to just one year’s emissions from modern China -I haven’t ‘fact-checked’ this, and it may be complete nonsense, but it makes the point that this is a planetary issue requiring an international response. It will be no good for the climate, or for Britain, if we cut our own emissions whilst they are more than made up for by increases from elsewhere.

We need to use the UK’s leadership to drive forward the climate agenda at the united Nations.
We’ve played an important role in establishing the Paris Agreement of 2015, and in the subsequent detailed work to implement it.
In this respect our International Development budget has been a vital component in establishing our leadership: we are the world’s second largest donor, and we are providing developing countries with £6 billion in the current spending round as ‘climate finance’ to help them cut their own emissions and to invest in resilience against the impact of climate changes that are already adversely affecting them.

All of this effort, of course, was well underway before pupils abandoned their classrooms to protest, or their parents and teachers glued themselves to Waterloo Bridge, but if it helps…

Normally anything one says in the House of Commons is a pretty well-kept secret. Last week however, a remark of mine got into the public domain and has prompted some outraged email correspondence.
In response to repeated demands from the Opposition benches for a second referendum in order to reunite the nation, I observed that anyone who thinks that another referendum will bring the nation back together must have been on another planet during the last one.

Overwhelmingly, the expressed preference of my correspondents is for us just to leave the EU without further agreement, and the sooner the better.
Nevertheless, even if some way behind, the second most popular view expressed to me is that there should indeed be a second referendum to settle the matter.

I have always taken the view that the terms on which the last referendum was offered was that it was to be a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to settle the question of EU membership.
To return to the same question in another referendum before we’ve even implemented the decision of the last one, would fundamentally undermine any residual faith in democracy.

If it were clear however, that the British people repented of their decision to leave the EU, even before we’ve left, then any democrat must accept that voters have a right to change their minds.
Ours is not a democracy that offers one person one vote -but only once! (much in the manner as did so many of our newly independent former colonies which ended up with ‘presidents for life’).
My own estimate however, is that opinion remains as divided as it was when we held our referendum in 2016 and therefore, the case for repeating it remains unconvincing.

A principal demand from opposition MPs is that, if the Government’s EU withdrawal agreement were to be passed by Parliament, then the negotiations with the EU which will then commence to define the terms of our future trading relation with the EU, should themselves be followed by a ‘confirmatory referendum’ on the question of whether to implement the newly negotiated trading relationship, or just to stay in the EU after all.

Apart from the fact that this would just be exasperating. It isn’t what we agreed to: we never suggested in the original Referendum Act, that we would have two referendums, one to decide in principle to leave, and then a second when the terms of a future relationship with the EU had been finalised. And the reason that we never decided to go about it that way should be blindingly obvious:
The starting point is that the EU doesn’t want us to leave. (We are the second largest net financial contributor).
If we present the EU with the finality of a decision to leave, then it is in their interests to negotiate a future relationship in our mutual best interests.
If however, the question of our leaving remains an open one whilst we negotiate the future relationship, then the EU strategy must be to get us to change our mind by making the future relationship as undesirable as possible.

A confirmatory referendum completely undermines our negotiating position for the future relationship; in just the same way as taking no-deal off the table undermined our negotiating position for the withdrawal agreement.

As I have previously observed, the essential problem stems from the PM’s defeat at the election of 2017. Without a significant majority, which is what she sought when she called the election, there was little chance of getting the clean BREXIT that she set out in her Lancaster House and Florence speeches and in her election manifesto.

 Yet the PM continued to raise our expectations by using the same rhetoric about leaving on 29th March and ‘no deal’ being better than a ‘bad deal’, despite the reality of the parliamentary arithmetic.

Encouraged by this perceived guarantee the majority of my correspondents continue to demand that we leave without a deal. Parliament demonstrated its unwillingness to allow a no-deal Brexit in three votes earlier this year and now it has changed the law to prevent it.

Accordingly, the only chance of a no-deal BREXIT now, is if one of the 27 EU member states refuses the application for a further extension of our membership which the law now requires the Government to make.

Weeks ago, when the Government still had freedom of action, I did urge the PM to consider proroguing this REMAIN Parliament to prevent it stopping her from leaving the EU. It is now too late to close that stable door.

To be honest I didn’t expect my advice to be taken. It is very difficult in a parliamentary democracy, to just prorogue parliament and govern without it, it is after all exactly what King Charles the First did, and it didn’t end well.

Unable to get a majority for her ‘high risk’ agreement (I voted for it despite that risk, because I thought the risk of not leaving the EU at all was even greater), the PM has now reached out to find common ground with the Leader of The Opposition, to my dismay and that of my colleagues.

Labour brings two demands to the table.

First they want a ‘confirmatory referendum’ which is just a euphemism for overturning the result of the last one. Anyone who believes that another referendum is a way of healing the division within our nation, was clearly on another planet during the last one.

The second demand is that we agree a permanent customs union (which is the essential core of the EU) and means that our trade policy will be governed by the EU. Mr Corbyn believes that new inclusive arrangements can be negotiated to give us a say, this is nonsense: the EU treaties specifically exclude any such possibility.

The problem with a customs union is that it is all give and no take. We would literally be traded: The EU would be at liberty to make trade agreements with third countries where access to our market was part of the deal, but with no reciprocal access for us to that of the third country. We would subsequently need to try and negotiate that access bilaterally with the third country, but what could we offer, and why would they negotiate? -already having free access to the UK market.

‘Vassal state’ hardly does justice to such a status.  We would have forfeited the principal economic benefit of BREXIT.

Could I vote for such a shadow of BREXIT? 

Only, if it is a question of that, or no BREXIT at all.

If we remain in the EU the ratchet of ever greater political and economic integration will continue relentlessly as it always has done since we first joined.

If we leave however, the ratchet will work in the opposite direction: Political independence and a measure of economic freedom will be intoxicatingly liberating, and will inexorably lead to demands for more.

Equally, without Mrs Thatcher’s rebate, with a requirement to join the Euro, to handover our waters once again, and re-join the Common Agricultural Policy, there would be no prospect of tempting us back.

I am deeply distressed that we haven’t left already and that we face another prolonged extension with tortuous and deeply unsatisfactory negotiations.

BREXIT will be a long haul, a process rather than an event, but the alternative is much, much worse.

At eleven o’clock last Friday night we should have been celebrating our departure from the EU. Instead I was fretting over the probability that we will lose the only opportunity in 46 years to return to the status of an independent nation.

I voted for the PM’s withdrawal agreement for the third time on Friday. 
Notwithstanding the risks that the agreement presents, and which I have explored in this column previously, I believe that the risk of no BREXIT is substantially greater.

What happens now?
Either we leave on 12 April without a deal,
Or we apply for a further extension of Article 50 negotiations.
The EU has made it clear that any such extension will have to be a long one, probably another two years, and no doubt other unwelcome -even humiliating- conditions may also be attached.

Of these two alternatives, the bulk of my correspondents demand a no-deal BREXIT. I suppose it might happen by accident but the EU certainly doesn’t want it and Parliament has now voted several times against it. My estimate is that its likelihood is very small.

So, we are probably looking at a long delay at best, and ultimately cancelling BREXIT altogether at worst.
A long extension to Article 50 -whilst whatever Parliament now fixes upon is negotiated- will, I believe, very probably lead to our remaining in the EU.
With every month that passes status of the decision of the 2016 referendum will erode.
Our political establishment will deliberately seek to present us with alternatives that are so dreadful, that we may opt in the end, to stay. (Indeed, I suspect that this has been their plan all along).
If we opt instead for some variety of ‘soft’ BREXIT, we will face the prospect of becoming a vassal state, our laws and trade policy dictated by the EU, without our voice or vote. (Nevertheless, the very nature of that status might inexorably lead to the demand for it to be remedied. The process of escape could conceivably continue).

If Parliament had accepted the PM’s deal despite all its shortcomings’, we would on 22nd May no longer have been a member of the EU and there would have been powerful correctives to any prospect of returning. We would have been free of the Common Agricultural Policy, free of the Fisheries Policy, and we would regain control of our borders. Anyone arguing for a return would have had to have persuade us to adopt the Euro, Schengen, and very much higher contributions without Mrs Thatcher’s rebate.

If we end up remaining however, the trauma of our failed escape attempt will make it very difficult indeed to persuade Parliament and people to give it another shot in our lifetime.

The only positive thing that I have to say, is that this isn’t over yet.
And, hey, Latvia might veto the request to further extend Article 50.
God save Latvia!