SHE lives to fight another day but Theresa May’s position on the Brexit high-wire looks increasingly precarious.
Having sneaked a Commons victory with just three votes on Monday, thanks to a shift to the Right, 24 hours later she sneaked another one by six votes, after avoiding a lunge to the Left.
The fact that the Prime Minister suffered, just minutes earlier, a four-vote defeat on the Trade Bill over Britain’s continued involvement in the EU's regulatory system for medicines, got drowned out by the applause for her Houdini-style escape from disaster on the customs union vote.
As one Government minister aptly put it: “It’s extraordinary that we lost the vote that didn't matter and won the one that did.”
But he then added: “I don't know where we go from here."
Indeed, Mrs May’s escapologist skills are being tested to the limit.
Her party’s two factions are making the Brexit horror show pure torture.
With immaculate timing, Sir John Major popped up as the nerves jangled over the customs union vote to point out how Mrs May’s hands were being bound by friend and foe alike and things were heading in one particular direction.
He bemoaned how some people were “continually chipping away against the unity of the Government” and he should know.
Indeed, the former Conservative showman suggested the PM was facing a battle against "Tea Party" Tories; far tougher than the fight he had with the Eurosceptic “bastards” of the 1990s. Which is saying something.
He suggested the country could end up with a no-deal scenario because it seemed whatever the PM produced faced the prospect of being voted down, which meant another general election was on the cards or even, whisper it, another referendum.
But if, as is the case, not only the Tories and Labour are riven on Brexit but also the country as a whole is, then whatever future vote were to take place in whatever format, we would be back to square one; half the country being satisfied and half the country being dissatisfied. A Disunited Kingdom.
And, of course, the Grand Guignol of Westminster is taking place even before we get to the little matter of the Brussels circus, whose Eurocrats have kept respectfully quiet as the Tory psychodrama unfolds but who will take centre stage in the weeks and months ahead.
Mrs May will need all her political contortionist skills to survive the pitfalls on both sides of the English Channel to take Britain, magically, towards that “smooth and orderly Brexit” she has for so long promised.
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