Mike Vickers' Blog

This evenings vote on ‘No Deal’ is too close for comfort and getting closer.
There is much manoeuvring in the Tory / DUP ranks.

Martin Kettle in the Guardian is also sanguine on the situation: he believes May is not dead yet. If no delay and now no No Deal then a third time May may succeed.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/13/theresa-may-deal-vote-mps-brexit

He considers that Hammond did a Bismarck this evening

“Nevertheless, Hammond seized his chance, giving a foretaste of the power shift inside the government that was to come in the evening votes. Chancellors get only two moments in the limelight during the year. Hammond knows he may not still be in the job by the autumn. So, he was not going to let this one slip. Brexit dominated the beginning, middle and end of his statement. Just before he sat down, Hammond summoned up his inner Bismarck. It was time, he said, “to start to map out a way forward towards building a consensus across this house for a deal we collectively support to exit the EU in an orderly way”.

“This may not sound ringing stuff. Yet in terms of the conventions of cabinet collective responsibility on central issues of policy, it was practically a call to storm the Winter Palace.”

We shall see what the vote is tomorrow.
There is also a touch of the New Testament in Kettle’s article:

‘Before the cock crow thou shall deny me thrice.’