Read between the lines and you see how panicked the Brexiteers are getting – they know their game is up

Even they have realised that after the latest developments, a Prime Minister Johnson cannot be countenanced

It is a decent measure of the Tories’ now total detachment from any sense of public duty that the party is now threatening to split over a vote that won’t happen.

According to Steve Baker MP, who is now kind of a big deal in a thing called the European Research Group, “at least 80” Tory MPs will reject Theresa May’s “Chequers plan” for Brexit in a House of Commons vote.

The European Research Group, by the way, is a curious coalition of hard Brexiteers within the parliamentary Conservative Party, who are to “research” what the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is to democracy. So dedicated are they in their “research” on matters European that, when asked if they might like to go public with any alternative suggestions for Brexit, Baker could only say: “We’re not the government. It’s not our job to dictate policy.” Which is true, and only mildly undermined by the fact that he was in the government until a month and a half ago, when he walked out over the Chequers agreement, having comprehensively lost an argument he and his acolytes now continue to fight.

Then there’s the fact that the Chequers “agreement” on which no one agreed has already been comprehensively rejected by the EU, on the grounds that if it accepted it, it would risk destroying the EU from within. Which means it has precisely zero chance of ever being put before the Commons in a vote anyway.

So quite who Baker is meant to be intimidating by hanging around outside the Palace of Westminster on Monday morning, waiting for the news crews to turn up so he can tell them what he would do in a situation that isn’t going to happen, is not entirely clear.

Is it possible to deduce that the hard Brexiteers are starting to panic? For most of the last two years, the conventional wisdom went that Theresa May could not possibly sack Boris Johnson, even after he came perilously close to having the prison sentence of a British women wrongly jailed in Iran increased because he couldn’t be bothered to read his brief properly, or made a horrific “joke” about dead bodies on the beaches of Libya needing cleaning up a bit.

Conventional wisdom stated that outside the government, Boris Johnson would be too powerful a critic, he would render the business of delivering Brexit impossible. Well, Boris Johnson is out of the government now, of his own choosing, and all he has conspired to do is humiliate himself yet further, and incinerate what might have remained of his vanishing credibility through the usual crass column-writing and, it would appear, the even more usual “closeness” to a female party colleague two and a half decades his junior.

Indeed, it may even be that this apparently deadly weapon, now unleashed on Theresa May from outside government, has delivered her the thing she might otherwise not have got.

Only one newspaper’s front page on Monday morning did not concern itself with Johnson and his private life, but he is all over that one too, if less obviously. According to the Financial Times, the EU27 are on the verge of issuing Michel Barnier with new instructions to offer Britain a deal, which one EU diplomat is quoted as calling a “Save Theresa” project.

Even they have realised, it seems, that the potential alternative – a Prime Minister Johnson – cannot be countenanced.

The terms of whatever this deal might be are certainly unclear. According to The Independent’s own Andrew Grice, sources in Brussels speak of the possibility of a “blind Brexit”, an agreement so vague it allows for the details to be worked out in a transition phase of goodness knows what length. But it might very well involve Theresa May saying yes to the EU’s proposed “backstop”, of keeping Northern Ireland within the single market and the customs union after the rest of the UK leaves it.

It is unpalatable to many Brexiteers, but the crucial detail will be the timing. If it falls to Baker and Co to vote it down, then they will carry the consequences.

If they kill off the deal they would certainly kill off Theresa May too. One of their lot would have to become prime minister in the midst of the economic shock that would immediately follow, and deal with their own mess themselves.

Whichever prime minister came next would also be stuck with a minority government, and a vast majority in the House of Commons that loathed them. Government would be impossible. The public would have to be asked to pass verdict on this self-indulgent kamikaze politics at the ballot box, right in the middle of the most dire consequences of it.

It is a course of action that will not happen. The Hard Brexiteers are losing their grip, and they know it. Nothing else can explain their panicked self-indulgence.