Liz Truss has been warned she has “12 hours” to save her job after “Armageddon” in Parliament last night.
For Tory MPs it’s no longer about the individual issues but about the utter, unprecedented breakdown in order and discipline.
A Cabinet minister branded her condition “terminal”. All that’s left is for large numbers to break cover and publicly demand she go.
Of all the things that hastened her demise, few expected it to be a Wednesday afternoon ‘Opposition Day Debate’.
Led by Labour, they’re usually badly attended and mean nothing. But last night’s led to the most chaotic vote most MPs have ever seen.
Labour MPs could barely hide their grins after Keir Starmer tried to drive a wedge into Tories over his bid to ban fracking - and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Tory whips lit a fire under the already simmering party by insisting Labour’s boring, technical vote about controlling Commons business would be a “confidence motion”.
This meant the government would fall if it failed - and any Tory MPs who refused to vote with the government could lose the whip.
Tory MPs in rural seats squirmed as they prepared to turn their own voters against them for “voting down a fracking ban”.
But less than 10 minutes before the 7pm vote, a minister told MPs it wasn’t a confidence motion after all.
All hell broke loose.
An MP who loyally voted against Labour’s “fracking ban” exploded to the Mirror: "F***ing c***s! I should have rebelled!
“I am f***ed in my constituency now."
A witness said Tory MPs were “effing and blinding” in the voting lobbies - two corridors each side of the chamber - as chaos raged.
A witness told the Mirror they saw two Tory whips in tears. “It was carnage. In all the years of Brexit and before that I’ve never seen anything like it,” they said.
Rumour went round that Wendy Morton, the Chief Whip, stood in the lobby and loudly declared she was no longer the Chief Whip.
Craig Whittaker, the deputy chief whip, was said to be in tears on the phone to a journalist. A witness reported he exploded: “I am f***ing furious and I don't give a f*** any more.”
For hours no one - and believe us, we tried everyone - was picking up their phones to confirm if the Chief Whip was gone.
“Sacked we hear”, an MP told me. Asked if the government had a chief whip, a senior No10 source replied: “Not a clue.”
Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, who various rumours suggested had taken Ms Morton aside, didn’t know.
"I'm not entirely clear on what the situation is with the chief whip”, he said enigmatically.
Eventually at 9.49pm, almost three hours after the chaos, we were sent a curt text by No10.
“Chief and deputy chief whip remain in post”, it said. We had to show the message to MPs to let them know what was going on.
Thirty-six Tory MPs did not vote - some of them permitted but others, including Net Zero chief Chris Skidmore - deliberately rebelling.
Bizarrely, Liz Truss and her Chief Whip were both initially on a list of MPs who did not vote on their own confidence motion.
It seemed that in the melee, they may have forgotten or been unable to swipe their electronic voting cards on a reader in the lobbies.
One claim is that they were both distracted. Liz Truss grabbed Wendy Morton’s arm to try to persuade her not to resign - but Ms Morton left the lobby trailing the Prime Minister behind her.
Thrown into that were damaging allegations MPs were “manhandled”. It’s understood the Speaker summoned MPs in for urgent talks.
A source close to Deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey said she had encouraged Tory MPs to support the government but denied that she had physically manhandled anyone.
The suggestion was that Wendy Morton had the U-turn on a “confidence motion” sprung on her, and was angry at being undermined.
One MP disputed this, telling me: “Most MPs furious Wendy allowed to stay. She's responsible for tonight's s***show.
“No10 say she agreed to it”.
But as the chaos raged, No10 then clarified - at 1.33am - that it was a “mistake” from No10 to claim it wasn’t a confidence motion.
In other words, it was supposed to be a confidence motion after all - and whips will now be inflicting punishment on Tory MPs who failed to back the government.
An MP in despair told the Mirror: “I have to put my makeup on in the morning and I look in the mirror and say - you’re a sellout.
“I can’t proudly call myself a Tory any more. I’m propping up this s*** administration.
“People will look at whether she can turn things around, and they will look at whether they can win with her as prime minister.
“If they cant, and she can’t, it gets to the Lady Macbeth territory - If it were done… then 'twere well it were done quickly.”
A Cabinet minister who supports Liz Truss told The Times: “It's terminal, the rancour in the parliamentary party is too much.
“She can't recover from this."
Veteran Tory MP Charles Walker said the Prime Minister should be gone by today. “She needs to go”, he raged.
“There may be 30 out there that still feel that somehow this shamble is recoverable. But about 330 of us have now given up all hope that the current PM can navigate her way out of this.”
In a powerful interview, visibly emotional, he told the BBC : “I think it's a shambles and a disgrace. I think it is utterly appalling. I'm livid.
"I really shouldn't say this but I hope that all those people that put Liz Truss in Number 10, I hope it was worth it.
"I hope it was worth it for the ministerial red box.
"I hope it was worth it to sit around the Cabinet table, because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary."
Tory MP Gary Streeter tweeted the morning after: “Sadly, it seems we must change leader.
“BUT even if the angel Gabriel now takes over, the Parliamentary Party has to urgently rediscover discipline, mutual respect and teamwork if we are to (i) govern the UK well and (ii) avoid slaughter at the next election.”
Tory MP Simon Hoare told the BBC the work of years to build up the Tory reputation was “dissolving before our eyes”.
“Can the ship be turned around? Yes. But I think there's about 12 hours to do it. I think today and tomorrow are crunch days,” he said.
Tory MP Crispin Blunt said her position is “wholly untenable. And if she doesn't understand that then I would be astonished”.
In a development no novelist could make up, Boris Johnson was watching this carnage unfold from afar - very afar.
He was given permission by the Tory whips to skip the vote, as he has every vote since July, because he’s on a Caribbean holiday.
As the night turned into a fever dream, Channel 4 News host Krishnan Guru-Murthy had to apologise for calling Steve Baker a “c***”.
Mr Baker, a Northern Ireland Minister, had defended the government in a bizarre interview round where he said sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman would be back in office in a few months’ time.
The surreal atmosphere seeped into the PinkNews awards a few hundred metres away at Westminster’s Church House.
Justice Minister Mike Freer said on stage: “I’m not quite sure what job I’m going to have by the end of the night.”
And Labour’s jubilant Emily Thornberry had the time of her life auctioning off a bottle of champagne signed by Liz Truss.
“You’ll be owning a piece of history!” said the host.
The Shadow Attorney General added: “You’re talking about a government that may not be here in a few hours!”
It sold for what appeared to be £801 - though the man I thought bought it professed no knowledge when I found him later.
A senior Tory last night told the Mirror that Ms Truss has “hours not days” left in power. “It is Armageddon,” they said.
One of the most astonishing things about all of this is it overshadowed the explosive resignation of the Home Secretary.
Suella Braverman quit after breaching the ministerial code, and tried to turn it back on Ms Truss.
"Pretending we haven't made mistakes is not serious politics”, she snapped after a “fiery” 90-minute meeting with the PM.
Raised voices were heard in the PM’s Commons office as they reportedly clashed over a plan to liberalise immigration rules to boost economic growth.
Liz Truss’s reply was curt, her bizarrely enormous signature bigger than her entire reply.
The only thing more bizarre was that Grant Shapps - who days earlier said Liz Truss could be gone inside a week and "she needs to thread the eye of a needle with the lights off, it's that difficult" - was made Home Secretary.
An incredulous Tory MP said of Shapps - whose alter egos once drew headlines - “Will he be sending documents as Sebastian Fox? How many phones has he got??”
Perhaps most bizarre of all was the moment Liz Truss left out the back gate of Downing Street - we think to meet the King.
That’s usual for a Wednesday - it’s when they have their weekly audience. Nothing to panic about.
But the growing mood among MPs is she’ll have to see King Charles again before next week.
