IT’S a strange thing, advice. All the evidence suggests that most people don’t want it, or want it only so that they can ignore it. In politics, however, everybody always wants to see any advice that has been offered. That’s presumably because they’re so ready to offer their own, which is invariably that the other side have got it wrong, and everybody would be better off voting for their party.

For their part, people who have sought advice usually seem reluctant to let anyone else see it, which immediately leads to the suspicion that they’ve ignored it, or that it’s warned them that their new favourite idea is a damn stupid one. It may be some such suspicion which makes a lot of people, including the Cabinet, the DUP, the Labour Party and the mutinous European Research Group, keen to see the advice the Attorney-General has given Theresa May on the Brexit agreement that – we are assured – will be sorted out any minute now.

Perhaps there is some dim awareness in everyone’s minds that the word derives from a Latin phrase which means “according to what is seen”. Even so, there are a number of reasons why governments may not want to publish advice they’ve been given.

Not all of these redound to their credit. (Does anything except credit redound?) Take, for example, Alex Salmond’s administration spending £19,452 and 92p fighting a freedom of information request to see the legal advice that suggested that an independent Scotland would remain in the EU. It turned out that the reason he was keen no one should see this advice, to which he’d alluded in several interviews, was that there wasn’t any.

Another less than convincing example was Lord Goldsmith’s advice to Tony Blair’s Government on the legality of the Iraq War – which was eventually published in 2005. In that case, the then attorney-general had concluded that the war was legal.

For those who think the invasion of Iraq wasn’t legal, his reasoning had nothing to do with misleading intelligence briefings or claims about Iraq’s chemical weapons, but was that UN resolution 1441 reasserted resolution 678, which had authorised war if Saddam Hussein breached a ceasefire, which he did. But that’s by the by.

He also pointed out, which may be why Mr Blair was reluctant to make the advice public, that a court might not find that a good enough argument. That’s a further difficulty of legal advice: there are at least two sides in most disputes, and both usually have at least superficially presentable arguments.

Even worse, from the Blair Government’s point of view, was Lord Goldsmith’s specific advice that what he thought would probably hold up for making the war legal certainly wouldn’t be regarded by a court as sufficient justification for a war that had regime change as its objective.

The frankness of Lord Goldsmith’s document does offer an indication of the one really good reason that a government may have for not routinely disseminating advice it receives. Which is that, when it is known that advice will be published, the author may be constrained by the knowledge that his or her words will be read by a wider audience.

Those of us with the full expertise afforded by sporadic viewings of Crown Court, Petrocelli or Better Call Saul will be aware that lawyer-client confidentiality is a central feature of all that legal malarkey. And it’s a reasonable point that there’s previous little point in getting advice at all if it is not frank and straightforward, even – and probably especially – if some of it is not what you wanted to hear.

There are people who have already made up their minds that the Chequers deal, or whatever it has transmogrified into, is certain to be a dud anyway. But others will want to know if, for example, the Attorney-General has concluded that the so-called “backstop” in any proposed agreement with the EU would bind the UK’s freedom of manoeuvre indefinitely, if and when it kicks in at the end of the transition period.

The Irish border has provided the EU with a plausible mechanism by which to keep Northern Ireland (and because a customs border at the Irish Sea would be unacceptable to any British government, probably the whole of the UK) tied to its regulations and trade model.

That’s perfectly reasonable from their point of view, and even most Brexiters would concede that a period of adjustment, during which we’ll effectively continue in fairly close alignment with the EU, is probably necessary if we want to avoid a short, sharp shock on exit. As long as it is short, of course.

But the transition and duration of the backstop need to be short, too, or there is precious little point in Brexit at all. Yet the EU has no incentive ever to let the backstop drop; without an exit procedure from its provisions (whatever they may prove to be) that the UK controls, Brussels could simply spin out trade negotiations for years.

As it happens, I would be quite relaxed about staying in the single market, perhaps on terms similar to Norway. But the customs union would preclude forging our own deals with third parties – and if we can’t do that, Brexit will effectively not have happened. The fine detail of the legal advice which, though the Attorney-General is a politician, should be politically neutral, is where there should be warnings of the potential mantraps for the future.

I can see why Mrs May, with her quite extraordinary genius for missing the point, failing to grasp the details and above all, confining herself in unnecessarily restrictive positions entirely of her own devising, should be reluctant to let anyone else know whether some such warning has been given to her. She is, after all, insistent that it’s her deal or no deal – even though there is not, and never has been, any reason at all for her to take such a stance.

Unless others beyond the tiny clique who have so far helped her mismanage this whole process get the chance to see the detail, however, I cannot for the life of me see why we should take her word for it that her deal will do what she claims it will. And that does need to be seen.IT’S a strange thing, advice. All the evidence suggests that most people don’t want it, or want it only so that they can ignore it. In politics, however, everybody always wants to see any advice that has been offered. That’s presumably because they’re so ready to offer their own, which is invariably that the other side have got it wrong, and everybody would be better off voting for their party.

For their part, people who have sought advice usually seem reluctant to let anyone else see it, which immediately leads to the suspicion that they’ve ignored it, or that it’s warned them that their new favourite idea is a damn stupid one. It may be some such suspicion which makes a lot of people, including the Cabinet, the DUP, the Labour Party and the mutinous European Research Group, keen to see the advice the Attorney-General has given Theresa May on the Brexit agreement that – we are assured – will be sorted out any minute now.

Perhaps there is some dim awareness in everyone’s minds that the word derives from a Latin phrase which means “according to what is seen”. Even so, there are a number of reasons why governments may not want to publish advice they’ve been given.

Not all of these redound to their credit. (Does anything except credit redound?) Take, for example, Alex Salmond’s administration spending £19,452 and 92p fighting a freedom of information request to see the legal advice that suggested that an independent Scotland would remain in the EU. It turned out that the reason he was keen no one should see this advice, to which he’d alluded in several interviews, was that there wasn’t any.

Another less than convincing example was Lord Goldsmith’s advice to Tony Blair’s Government on the legality of the Iraq War – which was eventually published in 2005. In that case, the then attorney-general had concluded that the war was legal.

For those who think the invasion of Iraq wasn’t legal, his reasoning had nothing to do with misleading intelligence briefings or claims about Iraq’s chemical weapons, but was that UN resolution 1441 reasserted resolution 678, which had authorised war if Saddam Hussein breached a ceasefire, which he did. But that’s by the by.

He also pointed out, which may be why Mr Blair was reluctant to make the advice public, that a court might not find that a good enough argument. That’s a further difficulty of legal advice: there are at least two sides in most disputes, and both usually have at least superficially presentable arguments.

Even worse, from the Blair Government’s point of view, was Lord Goldsmith’s specific advice that what he thought would probably hold up for making the war legal certainly wouldn’t be regarded by a court as sufficient justification for a war that had regime change as its objective.

The frankness of Lord Goldsmith’s document does offer an indication of the one really good reason that a government may have for not routinely disseminating advice it receives. Which is that, when it is known that advice will be published, the author may be constrained by the knowledge that his or her words will be read by a wider audience.

Those of us with the full expertise afforded by sporadic viewings of Crown Court, Petrocelli or Better Call Saul will be aware that lawyer-client confidentiality is a central feature of all that legal malarkey. And it’s a reasonable point that there’s little point in getting advice at all if it is not frank and straightforward, even – and probably especially – if some of it is not what you wanted to hear.

There are people who have already made up their minds that the Chequers deal, or whatever it has transmogrified into, is certain to be a dud anyway. But others will want to know if, for example, the Attorney-General has concluded that the so-called “backstop” in any proposed agreement with the EU would bind the UK’s freedom of manoeuvre indefinitely, if and when it kicks in at the end of the transition period.

The Irish border has provided the EU with a plausible mechanism by which to keep Northern Ireland (and because a customs border at the Irish Sea would be unacceptable to any British government, probably the whole of the UK) tied to its regulations and trade model.

That’s perfectly reasonable from their point of view, and even most Brexiters would concede that a period of adjustment, during which we’ll effectively continue in fairly close alignment with the EU, is probably necessary if we want to avoid a short, sharp shock on exit. As long as it is short, of course.

But the transition and duration of the backstop need to be short, too, or there is precious little point in Brexit at all. Yet the EU has no incentive ever to let the backstop drop; without an exit procedure from its provisions (whatever they may prove to be) that the UK controls, Brussels could simply spin out trade negotiations for years.

As it happens, I would be quite relaxed about staying in the single market, perhaps on terms similar to Norway. But the customs union would preclude forging our own deals with third parties – and if we can’t do that, Brexit will effectively not have happened. The fine detail of the legal advice which, though the Attorney-General is a politician, should be politically neutral, is where there should be warnings of the potential mantraps for the future.

I can see why Mrs May, with her quite extraordinary genius for missing the point, failing to grasp the details and above all, confining herself in unnecessarily restrictive positions entirely of her own devising, should be reluctant to let anyone else know whether some such warning has been given to her. She is, after all, insistent that it’s her deal or no deal – even though there is not, and never has been, any reason at all for her to take such a stance.

Unless others beyond the tiny clique who have so far helped her mismanage this whole process get the chance to see the detail, however, I cannot for the life of me see why we should take her word for it that her deal will do what she claims it will. And that does need to be seen.