Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I accept that point. This is the Committee stage, in which we have to examine how amendments are presented, and I am happy to accept the fact that that is what amendment 7 would achieve. However, I have some reservations about what would be put in place of subsections (7) and (8). We are still left with the problem that clause 26 provides that clause 24 would not apply in exceptional cases. What criteria would apply in that case? Clause 26 states that a Minister need only be "of the opinion" that an exception should be made. As I said in an intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), once we enter that territory, we are instructing the courts that an issue is a matter of judgment for a Minister, and applying the word "exceptionally" to that muddies the waters considerably. Without wishing to impugn the motives of the Government—although I am happy to do so on most occasions—I am afraid that they have ended up with something that is almost contradictory. It says on the one hand that the courts should not interfere, but, on the other, that if a Minister decides that a treaty is an exceptional case, the courts should have some latitude in deciding whether that is so. The drafting of these clauses worries me, and I return to my concerns about ratification versus signature. If we were to relate the questions being considered to signature rather than ratification, the provisions would contain the appropriate criteria for deciding how the consent was arrived at—because it is consent that we should be considering, not merely the mechanics of ratification. As I have said on several occasions, in the British constitutional context, ratification tends to take place at the end of the procedure, as I found out to my cost—but not actually to my costs—when I took the Government to court over the Lisbon treaty. I sought to go to the High Court, but was turned down on the grounds that I was engaging in a political exercise—which of course was not true, was it, Sir Nicholas?