The hon. Gentleman is chairman of the group; I think it is reasonable to assume that he speaks for the group.
The Foreign Secretary, who is not exactly one of the leading Europhiles in the Government, made his view of that demand known within hours of the introductory article being printed:
“If you were talking about the House of Commons having a unilateral red card veto, that’s not achievable, that’s not negotiable because that would effectively be the end of the European Union.”[Interruption.]
Some Conservative Members may cheer that conclusion, but what is happening is that the Government are learning the meaning of the term “transitional demands”— demands that are made by those who know that they will not be met, as a pretext for saying that they have been betrayed and then campaigning for what they always wanted, which in this case is exit from the European Union. The new group calls itself Conservatives for Britain; they are, in fact, the desperate to be disappointed.
This is the Prime Minister’s problem: there is nothing he can negotiate that will satisfy a significant proportion of his parliamentary party.