YouSaid · the spoken record

Geoffrey Cox

lines on the record: 49
first: 2019-04-04
most recent: 2019-04-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm a jobbing lawyer, Nick. I'm deeply privileged to be the Attorney General. I never expected to be. I shall be more than content to return to private practice in due course and slip invisibly beneath the anonymous waves of the bar again.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not going to make any aspersions or rude allusions to the leader of the opposition. He knows my opinion. I've just restated it. But I always believe in personal civility.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which bit of you would? The start or the bit of the front? There is shadow under this red rock come in under the shadow of this red rock, and I will show you something different from either. Your shadow at morning striding behind you, or your shadow at evening rising to meet you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm told that I've got a career in audiobooks. I have a son, actually, who is very keen and does make audiobooks. I am delighted to take commissions once I've stepped down, Nick.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think so because I think the Conservative Party has the most extraordinary capacity to coalesce, to recognise sometimes late the need for compromise and for unity and common sense. We are and the essential vehicle of government at the moment. The opposition is simply not fit to govern. The leader of the opposition is simply not fit to be the Prime Minister of the country. It is vital that the Conservative Party sustains itself in office and sustains its unity.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, conservatives have always known when to make a compromise. We must be willing to make one now for something greater, something new”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a great admirer of Wellington. And Wellington, you will recall, led his troops out of the House of Lords and compromised to the extent that he allowed the eighteen thirty two Reform Act to go through.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say we must use any means to secure the ends, any lawful means, I should add as attorney general. We are assisting at the birth of something new. Births are not always easy, and we must take the necessary steps to achieve our departure. Those seventeen point four.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm anxious that people will be conquered by fear rather than by the courage and necessity of taking this last step when seventeen and a half million voted to leave. That was a revolutionary act. It was a step that was designedly taken by those millions to break what existed and to move into something new. We must move into that something new.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I have no fear of the independence. I believe once we're out of the European Union, we will again savour and snuff the cholera air to quote Burns, because we will sense the fresh air and the breezes, and we will respond to them as this country has always done. We've been forty five years in the European Union, we've been hundreds of years as an independent nation. In forty-five more years, our membership of the European Union will seem a quaint eccentricity, because we as a nation are gifted with the most massive, creative, imaginative, technical and other resources and skills, and we can capitalize on them, but yes, when you come to that last step, there is inevitably a moment of hesitation, which is what the House of Commons is going through now.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it gets us out of the European Union, because it is the means by which we exit, it has imperfections, it has elements of it which people will find possibly even distasteful. But in as a whole, it preserves legal order and continuity and certainty. It gives reassurance to millions of citizens, including a million British citizens in Europe. It gives continuity and certainty to millions of businesses and millions of transactions that are going on. Now these things are really vital, and as governors, as people who are in charge of the government of the country, we can't just ignore them.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I understand because people have dreamed, they have yearned for this moment, they believe in it with all their soul that we need to achieve our freedom exit from the European Union. But it needs a hard headed understanding of the realities. And that is what is so important now. And as Attorney General, it's my job to remind the government of what those in a hard headed way of what those realities are.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that reflects, doesn't it, what we were discussing earlier, which is that this is a complex problem, and in fact the real options for us leaving the European Union were always going to be through a very narrow door. The fact the truth is that a realistic understanding of the problems that we faced in doing so would have led us to understand that this needed to be done with very great care, probably in a phased and graduated way. And the real truth of our situation is such that I I just feel that we have underestimated its complexity, so I would return to that. It's so important in understanding the problems we face.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple of oil drums and slashed together with bamboo, I think, something with a plastic sail. It's not that I was compared.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I am the law officer. I am the Attorney General. It's my role to be independent when I give legal advice. I would have no self respect as a lawyer, and remember I've spent thirty six years as a lawyer far less than that as a politician, nine months in front line politics. I would have no respectability if I blurred altered or massaged my opinion for political considerations, and that it is vital to the institution of my office, that people have confidence at the Attorney General will not alter his opinion for political considerations.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I received the documents at eleven o'clock that night and I stayed up until after five in the morning writing. It wasn't agonizing because the legal realities were so clear. There had been significant improvements, as I recited, improvements which I was able to tell the house would make a real difference to the likelihood of our ever being trapped or detained in the backstop, but the fundamental problem was that if talks broke down. There was still no legal way by which the UK could get out of it.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“something as significant of that, even as unthreatening as it had been drafted, and so the conversation ended. I think there was a disappointment that I'd not come there to engage in a fudge, to engage in a cosmetic exercise which would lead to a trajectory that couldn't move my opinion, but that's not why I was there.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all the ones that was nothing tough about it at all, because we put our proposals, it became very clear that the Tassel fifty felt that they didn't have a mandate to negotiate.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You shouldn't believe all that you read and that is leaked. One day, Nick, and to you I will give you my account of what happened, but I've made a conscious decision not to respond to some of the things that came out. Suffice to say that I have conducted negotiations many times in thirty six years of legal practice, and a lot of the stories that emerged were frankly just nonsense.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I meant Sabine Wayet. I meant Michel Barnier who was there from time to time, and I met a good number of the lawyers who serve the task force fifty. They were very cordial, very civil, they were very able people. We put some extremely well thought through and reasonable proposals. They had been very carefully designed. But what they did do was achieve a serious and real change in the backstock. It was extremely graduated, it was very unthreatening, but what was clear was that they were unwilling to move as far as that required.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in those circumstances we have to reevaluate where we would be. The problem then would be we'd be in an extension. It's likely to be a long one, by which I mean longer than just a few weeks or months because I've had a few. That will be a matter that the European Union, as you know, will set. We will be, no doubt, offered an extension with a date on it, and the Prime Minister will be required to accept or reject it, but of course now that the Cooper Bowls bill is passing”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as you know, the next stage would be the next proposal the Prime Minister has made is that we should hold around a voting. The options could be agreed between the parties, and if the parties were to agree, for example, that we would be bound by the outcome, that would be another way forward. But again,”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think, again, the Prime Minister and the government is entering these discussions in good faith and with no preconditions. I think a good deal of persuasion might be needed to satisfy the government that a second referendum would be appropriate, but of course we'll consider any suggestion that's made.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be a negotiation which would need to end in something that was definable as a customs union, and of course Parliament would have the right to review the negotiations, and we've already said that Parliament would have a much larger role. So, no, I'm not saying for a moment that the negotiating endpoint wouldn't be a customs union. It's just that customs union can differ in their terms and conditions.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the Prime Minister is open to is a flexible discussion without laying preconditions, if that, if the discussion moves towards a customs union, we'll have to see precisely what that would entail. Of course, we're talking about a negotiating mandate. We're not talking about signing up to one. A customs union has all sorts of begs all sorts of questions. You've got to define what you mean, you've got to ask questions such as is interminable, is there a price to be paid for it in terms of contributions? There are many, many negotiating factors that need to be considered.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I hope you're wrong about that, Nick. I think that history will judge very harshly anybody who enters into these discussions without an appropriate flexibility and candor about altering their positions the Prime Minister has said, for example, that she will look again at her red lines that's a genuine offer, and we need to see it reciprocated, as I'm sure it will be, by those talking for labour.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I understand it's a profoundly a profoundly difficult thing for a conservative to do. It might have been easier in previous generations of the Labour Party. This one makes it particularly difficult, but I think in the interest of the country we have to try. And it's producing considerable support. If we are to exit the European Union, and we need to do so swiftly because it is having a damaging and corrosive effect on our body bulleting, then we are offering the leader of the opposition, the Labour Party of the opportunity of doing exactly what they told the country they would do, and of combining to ensure we leave.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think we need to do things differently. I think we need to approach this, as I've said, in a complex and imaginative way, understanding why it is that people feel deeply troubled. by the events that have transpired, and approaching it in a more consensual fashion, which is now what I think we are doing. After all, it's no more than a reflection of the numbers. I mean, we have a minority government. We've got a division on the government side. The only option, therefore, is to look across the House and see if there are people who sincerely want to do what they've told the country they want to do, which is see the European us leave the European Union.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Nick, I do. I'm a bit of a stickler here. I actually believe, though it's these days more honored in the breach, in collective responsibility, and that means that it's inappropriate of me to say what I said to Cabinet. What I can tell you out.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I completely agree with that because what the whole Brexit saga does is touch deep chords of identity. And over the last 45 years, the British identity has started quite subtly to change. Generations have grown up who have been members of the European Union and subliminally but partly deliberately by the cultivation by the Commission of a deliberately pan or European identity, there is an element of generations under forty five who may have started to see themselves as having a European identity and by taking that away you touch upon something very deep and this is what I mean by the need for a complex imagining of the depth of the problem and the complexity of the approach that is needed in order to extricate ourselves and the dangerous oversimplifications I've said this in the House of Commons is the enemy of a chief”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A conference speech. I think I'd have lost the audience in five seconds. Do I regret it as a whole that we haven't? Educated the public educated ourselves into the view of the complexity of this, yes, I very much do.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a place for emotion and passion. There's a place for idealism. There's a place for the legitimate and profound convictions of many millions of people that something has gone wrong with our political system and that in some incot but nevertheless very tangible and real way, the fact that we surrendered our ultimate parliamentary sovereignty, our ultimate sovereignty over ourselves and our lawmaking is a contributing factor in that sense that our political system has gone wrong. So I can't, I don't think we can exclude emotion. But as you're right, the speech did have, and I think some commentators did pick it up, a much more complex message, which was that remember it's a conference speech. I mean, you can't be too forensic and you can't be too technical.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right The What the message that I was attempting to deliver to the conference was that in order for us to secure The prize that most of that audience wishes to see. It is going to be necessary for us to make compromises, and that is just a fact and a fact that is now borne out by the last six or eight months of events, and I hoped by showing that we could still achieve what for to many there is a glorious prize, we will need to make sacrifices.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's true People often throw around and fling about a lot of accusations in this debate the reason why this debate is so difficult is that it excites such strong convictions passions, emotions and controlling them and trying to look through them for a solution is exhausting the resources of parliament.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think that. There have been no recesses, as you know, this year thus far. I mean, this isn't a plea for sympathy. I mean, it's just a straightforward fact. And of course, what it's having, I think, is an effect upon the ability of people to think through problems. It frays tempers, particularly at a time when we need to Come together to discuss problems across party and across tribal divisions. It's undesirable, I think, to have as many members of parliament who look so tired as they are.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably would be insensitive of me to give a particular example of a poem that might have occurred to me, but I am increasingly fatigued by the stresses and pressures of this role, and that is no country for old men comes back repeatedly to my mind it's one of those limes and one of those poems by Yates which I very much love but no I mean look any great poetry is worth reading because as I say it orders one's thoughts and it helps one's think.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think solace is one word. I think somebody once said, I can't remember who it was, that poetry is the lung through which the soul breathes. And I find it very comforting to read, but it also helps crystallize one's own thoughts. It gives order to the emotions and it brings calm to the spirit, so I regularly read poetry, unapologetically and quote it unapologetically. So you're a”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have one by my bed. I regularly consult it as I do the King James Bible, which is poetry itself. These are parts of the mainsprings of English and British culture, and to me they're very important.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know why they should be for the reasons you say. I think poetry is one of the great occupations of human life. It's part of how one gets to know one's own culture and part of how one gets to know oneself, I think”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was he left school in nineteen forty four forty five, went straight into the army, saw the last few months of the war, and served another forty odd years in the Royal Artillery.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the roots of the coxes? Yes, yes, indeed. My family go back to the fifteenth, sixteenth century on the Devon Somerset border, and I'm very proud of where we live. My father was schooled in Taverstock, which I now represent. So we are West Country people and particularly Devonshire and Somerset people.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would it sound very different rather squeaky and I bitched? I very much doubt that. No, no. I mean, the voice I've always had a relatively deep voice, but I may well have”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, never, never, but when you are starting at the bar, you're in court every day, you got a new brief probably every day, certainly every few days or every couple of weeks. You have to read for that overnight, and you have to stand up and speak, and it provides over many years its own training.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The truth is that when you are speaking in court, particularly in the days when there were no microphones in court to a great deal of a great extent there aren't any now, although it's not conscious you train your voice to be audible to the judges, some of whom perhaps aren't in their first flush of youth.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wasn't born like Hypnick. No, I mean, and I was a choir boy. So I sang treble in the choir. I was a treble. I was a treble chorister. But no, I think the.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's odd, if I think about it personally, because it was something unexpected, but it's not odd if you think about what the country at the moment is facing. It's facing the most complex political, legal problem that it's ever faced in peacetime, I think, which is the extrication of this country from forty five years of legal and political integration. So it's not surprising that the lawyers, probably unfortunately, but nevertheless not surprising, are into some extent at centre stage because the unpicking of these extraordinary intricate and complex problems involves a great deal of legal analysis.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've come late into frontline politics. I was a professional barrister for 30-odd years, and I've been a backbench member of parliament, loving every minute of that, trying to protect my very rural, very beautiful constituency and its scattered village rural communities. That has been a very satisfying form of occupation for me for a long time, and now I suddenly find myself catapulted into frontline politics. It was most unexpected.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've talked to a lot of party members on the ground and I think they would find it unforgivable for us to sign off on Theresa May's deal without a concession that involves the people.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say we must use any means to secure the ends, any lawful means, I should add as Attorney General. We are assisting at the birth of something new. Births are not always easy, and we must take the necessary steps to achieve our departure.”
2019-04-04 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Geoffrey Cox One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source