I am extremely grateful for the extra minute.
Leaving is everything. That is the point. The rest of it is subsidiary. It is the ordinary activity of government, which the Government do as long as they command a majority in this House. The ultimate parliamentary scrutiny, which all Governments have suffered from going back at least to the 19th century and probably before, is the ability to command a majority in this House. If a Government can do that, it is then quite right that they are able to exercise the royal prerogative
in the details of negotiation. As my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) so rightly put it, if we were to tie down every jot and tittle of what the Government were negotiating, we would spend our whole time in the law courts. That makes government impossible.
It is not a man, a plan, a canal: Panama—a wonderful palindrome. It is a lady, a plan, freedom: Brexit.