Tonight's the Night

UPDATE II: May wins a vote of confidence 200 to 117. The zombie plods on. What now? Hopefully markets will pitch a fit because a crash-out seems more probable now than if May had lost. Corbyn is going to have to make a move. Talk is of a nuclear option: a non-binding motion of no confidence  with hard-line Tory Brexiteers joining with Labour, SNP, Liberal Democrats and Greens. Corbyn has been resisting this. He can no longer.

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UPDATE: Touts are picking May to hold on. (See "Betting odds indicate 89 percent chance UK's May wins confidence vote" by Andrew MacAskill.) If you look to money flows, people unloading pounds prior to the Brexit vote proved to be a more accurate predictor of the outcome than the opinion polls. So maybe May survives. Heaven help us.

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Finally. Tonight's the night. The necessary 48 letters have been received by the chairman of the appropriate committee. The Conservative Party will hold a confidence vote on prime minister Theresa May. The New York Times is reporting that May needs a bare majority of Tory MPs to survive. That magic number is 158. But Yves Smith points out that this is not true:

ConservativeHome debunks some earlier misreporting about the process. For May to win just over half of the 315 votes of MPs won’t be enough to save her:

It is being claimed that “158 is the magic number” – since 157.7 is what one is left with if one divides the 315 MPs in receipt of the Conservative whip in half.

But imagine for a moment that 159 MPs express confidence in her leadership, if a ballot takes place, and 156 do not. Could she then carry on as Party leader? We don’t think so. The ballot would not have found sufficient consensus for her leadership. We cite a precedent. 204 votes were cast for Margaret Thatcher during the 1990 Conservative leadership contest, and 168 were not – 152 Tory MPs opted for Michael Heseltine and 16 abstained. She won a clear majority of those voting. But she was forced out none the less.

My guess is that May is done. If she survives, by rule, the Tories are stuck with her for another year. There is no path forward with her leadership. She was rebuffed yesterday by all the European leaders with whom she met. If May survives it's a one-way ticket to crash-out. And while there are plenty of Tories for whom crash-out is the desired outcome, if May remains the chances of a general election in the near term are much more likely. So she has to go. That's how it looks to me.

May's people are showing their desperation. They are scaremongering, saying to remove the prime minister at this late stage invites a crash-out because her replacement cannot assume the position until late January or February, at the same time they are providing gumdrops, saying May will stand aside before the next general election if she wins the confidence vote.

If the Brexit politics of the Tories are wicked and opaque, the same goes for Labour. The Trotskyites have been good at sketching this out. Blairites are angling for another Brexit plebiscite, what's being touted as The People's Vote. The Trots have been critical of Corbyn's lack of leadership in bringing a vote of confidence on May to parliament (Yves Smith too, for that matter). But Corbyn's diffidence on Brexit has served him and Labour well. I would argue that it has been masterly, which is some kind of achievement because diffidence is not usually an attribute ascribed to a master.

Brexit is a manifestation of a paradigm that no longer has any credibility. Societies are in upheaval. Too much is happening too fast. The U.S. appears to be on the verge of war with China. Turkey has declared it will invade Syria to rid it of U.S. Kurdish proxies. Let's hope with tonight's vote there is a first step in the UK towards some sort of sanity.