Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

A living treaty

• Mark Mardell
• 26 Jun 07, 11:14 AM

I gave a talk to some teenagers at a local school yesterday and I was stressing that at the heart of journalism is the ability to keep asking questions until you get a clear picture.

Taking my own advice has, I think, driven me half-mad.

In the dead of Friday night/Saturday morning, getting my hands on the was the Holy Grail. Or perhaps elusive Holy Writ, for we pored over it, thirsty to drink the truth.

Now it lurks malevolently on my desk, glowing and defying interpretation. Of course, when I really need to quote from it, it has gone.

After 17 years before the mast at Westminster, I am well aware that most stories are a battle for interpretation. Grammar schools - good or bad? Weapons of mass destruction - did they believe they existed or not? And so on.

But this treaty is something else altogether. When in that dead of night I wrote that Britain’s safeguards on foreign affairs and the charter of fundamental rights were there in black and white and it would be pretty hard to quibble with them, I felt I was on safe ground.

But Neil O Brien, the director of (a pretty amazing outfit, the core of the old "No" campaign with a fairly clear Eurosceptic agenda but with a meticulous and hyperactive research department that makes some other think-tanks look slow off the block) wrote to me privately and politely pointing out they did indeed quibble rather strongly.

And so do the Conservatives. And then Tony Blair seemed to say in the Commons that in fact they were legally binding because , which nobody had seen, which said so.

Incidentally, David Cameron did say something about Tony Blair’s sweet-smelling trousers, didn’t he? I’m sure he said .

Or take the loss of vetoes. Tony Blair says there are . Some opponents say 68. The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ’s research department thinks it’s 32. Usually I would trust that as a solid fact, but I can’t when it’s a matter of political debate.

The scale of the problem became apparent when we asked one legal firm specialising in EU law to call it for us. Or, more realistically, say that it would be a field day for lawyers. Er. Um. They wouldn’t want to go that far. Or Not.

And then a senior academic was interview on our behalf in Britain. I won’t name him, partly for reasons of libel, but mainly because I don’t know his name. But I watched open-mouthed as the interview (never broadcast) was fed into Brussels.

He maintained that the treaty didn’t mean very much as it was only a very rough outline and the civil servants in the inter-governmental conference would decided what it really meant.

This is true of most IGCs but in this case is plain wrong, according to everyone I have talked to. But maybe he’ll turn out to be right after all.

I feel like I’m in a Terry Pratchett novel where, by the altering strength of belief and doubt, a document takes on a life of its own and changes its text depending who reads it, developing a will of its own.

Maybe it has acquired a single legal personality.

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