I am grateful to the noble Lord for effectively giving way. He rightly said, both in his letter to the Times and his remarks today, that, as long as there was good faith, fair enough, but if good-faith negotiations failed to reach an agreement—not if there was any lack of good faith, I think—we would be entitled under Article 62 to repudiate the treaty.
Certainly, the EU is showing a lack of fulsome good faith in two respects. First, it is refusing to accept in the current negotiations that any change to the protocol can be made—only to its implementation. Secondly, it is repudiating its original position that it could not enter into a permanent arrangement, which was the whole basis of the negotiations we entered into under Article 50. It is now trying to make something which was intrinsically temporary, and which it said
could be only temporary and provisional, into something permanent. I would have thought that, in both respects, had the British Government taken such positions, he and his friendly noble Lords would have denounced it as an appalling demonstration of bad faith.