Europe

He was Minister of State for Europe at the Foreign Office from 2001. The following year the government sent him to the Convention on the Future of Europe as its representative, alongside 104 others from national parliaments, governments and the European institutions, to draft what became the constitutional treaty. The work ran for the best part of two years, much of it spent defending British positions that had few other supporters in the room.

The treaty was rejected by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005, and much of its substance reappeared in the Lisbon Treaty two years later. The case he made at the Convention, that British influence depended on being at the table where the rules were written, is the one he has continued to make.

He opposed leaving, and was most exercised by the part of it that touched his own record. In November 2018 he argued that the Irish backstop was necessary rather than a negotiating device, on the grounds that the Good Friday Agreement had been built on a border nobody could see, and that leaving the customs union put that at risk. He spoke on the Withdrawal Agreement in the Lords in January 2019 and again in January 2020.