This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Lord Kerr. John Kerr is the former head of the British Foreign Service, a former ambassador to the United States and former permanent representative to the European Union.

John, you are widely seen as one of the architects

of Article 50 who drafted the wording of Article 50. It seems to me that the EU existed very

nicely without an Article 50 clause in it for several decades. Why do we have an Article 50 now?

That's very good question. And it is quite true that we didn't need an Article 50 to permit people to leave the European Union if they wanted to.

If you didn't pay the bills, if you didn't come to the meetings, in due course people would notice that you appear to have left.

But I think there were three motives.

We're talking January 2003

in the Convention in Brussels

chaired by President Ghishti Stan,

representatives of all member state governments

and oppositions and the European Parliament

and the Commission.

And the idea that people had in mind, I think, was that to emphasise, there's a lot of things

in the draft treaty we wrote then did, that the EU is a voluntary combination of member states.

It has empowered the central institutions to do various things in various areas.

Some areas that's given them full powers and some areas has given them

powers shared the member states, some areas has given virtually no powers. And it's all

voluntary and can only grow its powers by agreement of all the members. It's a treaty-based

organisation. Treaties require unanimity and need to be ratified by everybody.

There is, and there always was, an accession clause, and the idea was that it would

emphasise the voluntary nature of the thing, that you were not tied to your oars, going to an

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