Consumers who buy faulty goods or services abroad will be entitled to a refund from their credit card company, after a landmark legal judgment yesterday.

Despite that legal judgment, his own political view was that he could live with voting for the treaty.

His name was all over the written legal judgment of the salary-cap breach, which made his position untenable.

A landmark legal judgment has opened the floodgates to potentially hundreds of millions of pounds in extra compensation claims against banks over missold hedging products.

Although gifted with first-class legal judgment, he never rested on the obvious or intuitive answer or solution but subjected every element of his draft advice to the most rigorous scrutiny.