Well, the Cabinet Secretary is a kindly soul and moderate in speech—it's hard to quarrel with his rhetorical condemnations of the Conservative Government. If anything, he erred very much on the side of understatement. I've said before that Theresa May is even worse as a Prime Minister than John Major. I'll go even further—I think she's the worst Prime Minister we've had since Lord North. At least the flipside of his incompetence was that he created a new nation across the other side of the Atlantic that has been a beacon of freedom, enterprise and success for 250 years. The flipside of Theresa May's incompetence is that she's going to keep us in subjection to a European Union that is fundamentally undemocratic and that is, in relative terms, a failing federal project, economically as well as politically.

It's not surprising that this is the outcome of two years of non-negotiation, I suppose, because Theresa May is a remainer Prime Minister who presides over an overwhelmingly pro-remain Cabinet and has for support in the House of Commons a party that, by a substantial majority, supported 'remain', and the House of Lords was overwhelmingly pro-remain. If the people who are actually charged with the responsibility of delivering on the Brexit referendum don't even believe in the project, it's not surprising that what the Cabinet Secretary described correctly as chaos and mismanagement is the consequence, because they are a collection of defeatists, pessimists, fainthearts and, indeed, some of them, saboteurs as well. For all the high-flown language about wanting to respect the result of the referendum, there are many members of the Government who see this, as the Cabinet Secretary does, as a disaster for Britain. Therefore, they want to try to do their best to undermine the process, and they have spectacularly succeeded. 

Of course, the fundamental problem is that there has never been any preparation for a 'no deal' outcome. If there had been, then we might have been able to make some progress in our negotiations with the EU. 'If you want peace, prepare for war', is the old Latin tag, and the same is true in negotiations as well. The idea that Britain, as the fifth largest economy in the world and the eighth largest manufacturing nation in the world, which has a massive deficit in trade with the EU and is prepared to pay £40 billion a year in budget contributions over the next five years, has no negotiating weapons in its hands is absolutely absurd. Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on EU goods. The immediate effect of that was for German manufacturers of cars to call on the EU to scrap its auto tariffs against imports of cars from the United States, because they impose a 10 per cent tariff. As we know, the United States imposes only a 2.5 per cent tariff. The EU is a massive protectionist racket that operates to the disadvantage of the most disadvantaged people in society—the poor, those on the lowest incomes.

The outcome of this Chequers agreement, the only upside of which is to increase the support for UKIP from 3 per cent to 8 per cent in opinion polls in a week—there's that to be said for it, at least. But the outcome of this Chequers negotiation is a common rulebook that isn't a common rulebook at all—it's 'take it or leave it; accept the EU's rulebook'—and, if we're out of the EU, we won't even have the limited voice in the process of developing that rulebook that we have had up until now. We'll still be subject to the judgments of the European Court of Justice, so we won't get back control of our laws either. Then the so-called facilitated customs arrangement, which, as the Cabinet Secretary pointed out, David Davis has said is unworkable, and so it is too—it'll be vastly costly and bureaucratic—and then the so-called mobility framework, which is just an opaque cloud. We know nothing whatsoever about that so we can't, at this stage, form any judgment. What we, I think, can be pretty certain of is that the EU will insist upon free movement much as we have at the minute, and therefore we won't even have control over our borders either.