On Tenterhooks ...

Well, we're underway.

By 10pm UK time we'll know if we're lumbered with a time-expired failure of a PM to further drag the nation into chaos, despair and division, or whether my Party's MPs are giving the nation a fair chance of coming out of this with something salvaged. 

The ERG will settle on a single candidate. One Brexiteer MUST be on the ballot that will come to we members over Christmas - and I hope to God the Party uses an e-voting option rather than relying on the Christmas post. 

I hope and pray the Lord guides the conduct of our MPs today for the good of our nation and people.

If Tory Remoaners bring down the government, voters will tear the throat from the party

There must be a temptation amongst MPs closeted in the plush and rarefied atmosphere of Westminster to imagine themselves inviolable from the wrath of voters, immune from the tensions and passions in the nation clearly audible from social media. Nicky Morgan, Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen, Antionette Sandbach, Dominic Grieve and others may even now be building their future infamy - a future of derision, loathing and contempt - if their jejune and anti-democratic posturing, their preening narcissistic self-regard, their contemptuous dismissal of the popular will, brings down this fragile government and disrupts the Brexit process.

If they do so, the people will turn upon the Conservative party and tear its throat out. Tories will be more rare in the Commons than LibDems. They will have consigned their own party to the dustbin of history, and destroyed for themselves and their families any personal prospect of help or support from their peers. They will be shunned like wet lepers, regarded more lowly than the ordure on our shoes, despised and scorned. 

They are playing not with their own pathetic petty careers, not with their own overweening mediocrity, but with the future of our nation. And that's bloody serious.