Tory MPs are reportedly lining up with letters demanding the resignation of David Cameron if there is a Yes vote in Thursday's Scottish referendum, leaving the Prime Minister just four days to save his own skin.
Under the Tory party rules for forcing a leadership challenge, 46 Tory MPs would have to write requesting a contest to Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers. Organisers say they have more than enough votes to trigger a leadership contest if a Yes vote is declared at around 5 am on Friday.
With a poll of polls showing No only two points ahead of Yes, Cameron is going to Aberdeen today to warn the Scots that "there is no way back" to the Union if they vote for independence - but the message could equally apply to himself. “We must be very clear that there’s no going back from this. No re-run. This is a once-and-for-all decision,” Cameron will say.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
As the former Sky political editor Adam Boulton wrote yesterday: “The penny has now dropped in Downing Street that David Cameron's political life will be on the line if he loses Scotland.”
So it’s all hands to the pump. Having had the Queen break her silence by urging the Scots to "think carefully" before casting their vote, the Better Together campaign recruited David Beckham to kick off celebrity endorsements for the No campaign. Eddie Izard will host a Better Together show in Trafalgar Square tonight for the Scots in London who will travel north to cast their votes on Thursday.
Sadly, Beckham seems to have scored an own goal. In his open letter to the Scots, he wrote: “The achievement that gave me the most pride was to captain and play for my country.” As Andrew Sparrow of The Guardian points out, that is "rather odd because that country was England, not the UK".
Heading the Yes campaign's final heave, Alex Salmond will today meet pro-independence business leaders at Edinburgh airport. They include Brian Souter of Stagecoach, Marie MacKlin of Klin Group, Ralph Topping, former chief executive of William Hill, and Mohammed Ramzen of United Wholesalers.
Even if Scotland votes No, his MPs are on the warpath over Cameron's decision to surrender powers over taxation and welfare payments to Scotland – the so-called ‘Devo max’ option brokered by Gordon Brown last week - as part of his desperate effort to win the Scots round.
Yet another think tank, this time ResPublica, is arguing that if the Scots can enjoy ‘Devo max’ then so should the rest of us. ResPublica makes the case for Manchester to have its own tax-raising powers as a “city state”.
The threatened break-up of England into Labour-controlled city fiefdoms has infuriated Tory MPs who were already gunning for Cameron over his refusal to commit himself to pulling Britain out of the EU and his modernising measures such as the legalisation of gay marriage. They are demanding that 59 MPs with seats in Scotland (including 40 who are Labour MPs) should be excluded from votes on what would become the English budget.
John Redwood, a former aide to Margaret Thatcher, and leading eurosceptic, is leading the charge. “We [would] have a Union Parliament meeting as it does today and on other days in the week we would meet as an English Parliament,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme. “We are not going to be fobbed off with Balkanising our Parliament. We want an English Parliament.”
Meanwhile the Daily Mail reports a senior Tory MP suggesting there is pressure on Cameron to resign even if there’s a No vote on Thursday.
“More than 50 per cent of the Parliamentary party think the PM should go if he loses,” the unnamed MP is quoted as saying. “But there is also an iceberg contingent who will be restless if we win, because we have promised too much – and let Gordon Brown lead the way.”
He added: “A few MPs are very visibly complaining, but an awful lot more are grumbling out of sight.”
Bookies are offering odds of 8-1 on Cameron being forced to resign this year. If a no-confidence vote were to push him out, the Mole agrees with Mike Smithson at Political Betting that, so close to the May 2015 general elction, the Tories would have to avoid a lengthy leadership contest and go for a “coronation” as they did in 2003 when Michael Howard was made leader within two weeks of a no-confidence vote in Iain Duncan Smith.
Given that Boris Johnson is unavailable – only serving MPs would be considered – Smithson is putting his money (at 33-1) on Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, whose euroscepticism would increase the chances of some sort of pact with Ukip.
The Mole would be tempted by the shorter odds (16-1) available on the inscrutable Theresa May. The Home Secretary has carefully avoided becoming entangled in the swamp of issues that is sinking Cameron. She could yet rise above it.
