Well, the thing is, he contradicts himself now, because he complains about a directive, but in the future, the UK will have no role at all in influencing those directives. The UK will have to accept them or not have access to the European market. The UK's voice is much diminished now compared to where it was in the past.

Secondly, he seems to think the world out there is a world that is open to trade with the UK. Other markets are equally as closed. If you look at the US, that is a market that does not trade freely with the rest of the world, nor does China, nor does India. There seems to be this thought among some in his party that, somehow, the world is just waiting to conduct free-trade agreements with the UK. That is certainly not what other countries are saying, and certainly not what the experience has been in the past. Six or seven years is the average timescale for agreeing a free-trade agreement. We have in the US a President who puts America first. Does he really think that we will have an equitable free-trade agreement with the US with a president who is open about his views on protecting American industry? Will we have, for example, a back-door TTIP as a result of the Trade Bill, which forces us to privatise large parts of the public sector—something that we will oppose tooth and nail?

But, ultimately, as I've said before, we are at present in the single market. I'd like us to stay in the single market or have full and unfettered access to the single market. We already have a great deal of convergence with it. If we cannot agree a deal with a market where we have so much in common to begin with, we have no chance of agreeing a deal with other markets that are much, much different, with different regulations that we would then have to try to harmonise. The European market is our biggest market, it's on our doorstep, we have a land border with it, we export 60 per cent of our exports to it. We cannot allow our policy on the European single market to be blinded by ridiculous, nationalist nonsense.