I’m afraid this is simply bonkers. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/…
An Act of Parliament implementing the Withdrawal Agreement can override contrary provisions of the EU Withdrawal Act (section 1 of which, repealing the European Communities Act 1972, isn’t even yet in force).
The fact that the WA could not be ratified without such further legislation is not at all unusual: many treaties require amendments to domestic law before they can be ratified (ie become binding on the U.K. in international law). That doesn’t stop the Crown from negotiating them.
The PM’s inability to answer Bill Cash’s question is, I think, on this occasion simply attributable to the fact that off-the-wall questions are often impossible to answer (“where do I start?”).
The idea that Art 46 of the VCLT is if any relevance is also off the wall.
What is really constitutionally peculiar is that someone who is capable of writing such a poor piece of constitutional analysis ever made it to be shadow attorney general.
Mind you, that was under IDS as Tory leader. His replacement, when IDS was forced out and replaced by Michael Howard, was Dominic Grieve QC. Who, to put it mildly, would have written a rather more rigorous article.
