The Redwood Renegotiation

Here.

Although The Guardian ought to be ashamed of itself for having published his totally false inference that Labour had supported Martin Schulz (who, moreover, did in fact visit the United Kingdom during the European Election campaign, when he spoke in Northern Ireland in support of his own supporters in the SDLP).

But here we have it: Redwood believes in both the principle and the possibility of renegotiation.

Unlike Labour, he does not favour primary legislation at Westminster to restrict the benefits available to EU migrants, to introduce the Red Card system that would require any proposed new EU law to receive the approval of the European Parliament, or to do anything else that would be perfectly possible within and through our own parliamentary process, without the slightest need to ask anyone else.

Rather, he wants a never-ending renegotiation with people who can see nothing to renegotiate.

There is a school of thought that Redwood is the great missing man in the present Cabinet, the living symbol of the Right's exclusion. But in reality, even Hard Right figures such as the hapless Iain Duncan Smith and the laughable Owen Paterson are there ahead of him because they - yes, even they - are better than he is.

It is not as if he has never been tried. He has been a Cabinet Minister, and he was hilariously bad at it. He ought never to have been appointed. He will never be appointed again.

And why would those who advocate his return to office want him, anyway? He is nothing but a renegotiator, and he sets out that stall in the pages of The Guardian.

The rest of the supposed Outside Right, whom we are expected to regard as unjustly excluded, is made up of merely comical figures, the successors of Tony Marlow and Teresa Gorman.

During his Leadership bid in 1995, Redwood was unable to explain which of those two would be in his Cabinet, or who else would ever agree to serve under him.