There is one rule for government lawbreakers and another for people in Bolton

Quick public service announcement: If you happen to watch the news over the next day or so, and you think you see an actual government minister, standing at the despatch box of the House of Commons, saying that the government is about to break international law, then don’t waste your petrol money driving to Barnard Castle. Your eyes are fine. It really did happen.

If you don’t happen to catch the news then don’t worry, you can always wait for the Hollywood remake. Essex boy Brandon Lewis was the minister in question, and Essex boy Bob Neill MP his interrogator, so it’s been a good day for Ray Winstone and Danny Dyer, if absolutely no one else.

A few details: for 48 hours now, there has been considerable shock over reports that Boris Johnson, twice-divorced father of “n”, is planning to renege on a withdrawal agreement.  

The details are complex, so best just to picture the prime minister’s “oven-ready deal” as the crucial prop in the reenactment of the titular scene from American Pie.

That the government is planning to break the terms of a treaty it signed was sufficient to have the Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis brought to the despatch box of the House of Commons, where he provided the room with this for-the-ages clarification.

“Yes,” he said. “This does break international law in a very specific and limited way.”

It’s hard to know where to place it among the context of such things. When Richard Nixon explained to David Frost how “when the president does it it’s not illegal”, he’d been out of office for years and was in urgent need of a few quid.

Deliberate law breaking was not something he, or to the very best of my knowledge any government ever, has announced in advance.

It is also not uncommon for MPs to break the law, as is evidenced by the six of them that have gone to prison in the past decade. At the very top of the likelihood of imprisonment per capita index, there’s clear water between member of parliament and lorry driver.

But again, it does tend to be the case that people get retroactively caught out. Voicing an intention to break the law, which you have not yet done, while standing at the despatch box of the House of Commons and speaking on behalf of Her Majesty’s government, is novel.

It also goes some way to explaining why, in the moments before it happened, the head of the legal department of the civil service, Jonathan Jones, became the sixth department head to resign in a matter of months. Insider reports of exchanges between Jones and the prime minister have been leaking out all afternoon, though you don’t necessarily need to have been in the room where it happened to imagine the scenes when the government’s senior lawyer is told the government is announcing its intention to break the law.

So jaw-dropping was Lewis’s utterance that his subsequent explanation has already been almost forgotten: that the intention to deliberately undermine the withdrawal agreement via the new Internal Market Bill was no different from the tax avoidance provisions of the Finance Act of 2013, a claim I have since put to two senior tax lawyers, one of whom described it as “somewhat disingenuous” and the other as “utter boll***s”.

Without wishing to get too technical, even if overriding tax treaties you might have made with other countries so as to prevent tax avoiders hiding their unpaid tax there is in any way comparable, there is also the realpolitik aspect to consider. Which is to say that, at the time of the Finance Act 2013, the government was not about to enter the final stages of a nation-defining negotiation with Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow.

And then there’s the realpolitik of the wider moment to worry about too. Waiting to replace Lewis at the despatch box was Matt Hancock. It was shortly to be his job to explain to the public that, having been bribed into eating in restaurants and threatened with redundancy if they don’t go back to the office, it was now their fault that coronavirus infections were soaring and if they didn’t immediately stop doing exactly what they’d been told to do there’d be trouble.

It was in this new context, of serving in a government that has just announced its intention to break the law, that Hancock had to announce a local lockdown in Bolton.

So at least in that regard, Lewis has provided a valuable public service. It’s hard to imagine your local lockdown-enforcing police officer even bothering with an eye roll the next time they hear the Barnard Castle defence. Now, you can just say that you’re only breaking the law “in a very specific and limited way”.