Will they rebel or won't they? The European Research Group has always been a ragtag crew of Tory backbenchers united only in their hatred of the EU. But when Jacob Rees-Mogg stepped outside parliament last Thursday morning, just after the prime minister had finished giving her statement on her proposed Brexit withdrawal bill, to announce that he had sent his letter of no confidence in the prime minister to Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee, it felt like a moment when Brexiteer fantasy might become reality.

The ERG had always previously talked a good game on a no confidence vote. Time and again, it had declared that it was in touching distance of the necessary 48 letters to force a no confidence vote and that other discontents were merely biding their time for the right moment to dislodge Theresa May, only for nothing much to happen. But this felt different. After all, if Rees-Mogg, the leader of the ERG, had sent in his letter then surely the ERG must be confident that this time they had the numbers.

Except as the days have passed it's looking increasingly likely that they don't. Brady has refused to say how many letters he has received, insisting only that the necessary threshold has not been reached and the ERG has been frantically backtracking. There might only have been 20 or so Tory MPs who would openly fess up to having submitted a letter, but there were others who had done so privately. The magic number would be reached tomorrow. Always tomorrow, manana, manana. So far tomorrow hasn't come and if a no confidence vote isn't forced by Tuesday then it rather looks as if the ERG might have shot its bolt. For now.

The malcontents in the cabinet also appear to have gone quiet. After the resignations of Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and work and pensions secretary Esther McVey on Thursday, attention focused on those who had reluctantly agreed to remain in May's top team. Michael Gove – one of the original Brexit architects who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Boris Johnson in front of the £350 million bus – didn't feel able to finish what he had started by accepting Raab's old job.

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What's more, Andrea Leadsom, Penny Mordaunt, Liam Fox, Chris Grayling and Gove himself – not so much the Famous Five as the Fatuous Five – had let it be known that they were planning their own private mission to Brussels to renegotiate the entire 570 page withdrawal treaty in a matter of hours. A document that had taken the best part of two and a half years to negotiate in its current form and which the EU had already said was non-renegotiable. It's not just the ERG who are fantasists. It was also a peculiar display of the principle of collective cabinet responsibility.

Now the Fatuous Five are hastily back-tracking. They were never really going to go to Brussels to talk to the EU negotiators. They were just going on a Eurostar away day. The mood music has changed. Over the weekend the prime minister's PR offensive appears to have paid off.

First she gave another of her excruciating "personal" interviews to the Daily Mail in which she let slip that she had opened a can of baked beans and drunk a large scotch that her husband had poured after her marathon Thursday. Then she went on Sophy Ridge On Sunday on Sky News to sell her deal and persuade Tory MPs that a leadership battle might not be such a great look at this time.

Although May said that what she was doing was in the national interest, it looked suspiciously more as if it was acting in her own and the Tory party's interests. And the Conservative party has listened. They have seen that Labour is three points ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls for the first time in years and reckoned the country is taking a dim view of a government at war with itself.

Things can change fast of course. Last week was a case in point. By Friday it appeared that the whole of Westminster had taken an overdose of amphetamines. But now everyone has come down off their speed high, it looks as if the prime minister has survived the first onslaught. And yet none of the fundamentals have changed, because her Brexit plan still looks to be dead on arrival when it comes into contact with the realities of the parliamentary arithmetic.

Just because Conservative MPs might be backing away from a leadership contest – principally because many of the rebels think she would win one – there is still open hostility to her plan. Whichever way May tries to dress it up, there is no getting away from the fact that what she has come back from Brussels with is far worse than the deal we already have with the EU and nothing like what she had promised the Brexiteers. May's new ploy of trying to get MPs to forget about the withdrawal bill and focus on the future trade arrangement (FTA) just looks desperate. There are just seven pages outlining the FTA in the withdrawal treaty, all of them non-legally binding aspirations. Expanding them to ten pages isn't going to help.

The simple reality is this: Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems, the Greens and Plaid Cymru have all said they will vote against May's deal. The DUP will vote against the deal. At least 40 members of the ERG will vote against the deal. Raab, McVey and several other junior ministers who have resigned will vote against the deal. About 12 hardline Remainers – Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston et al – will also vote against the deal. Boris Johnson and his brother Jo Johnson will also vote against the deal (for completely different reasons).

So unless something extraordinary happens – mass rebellions in the Labour party, the ERG deciding they had been wrong all along, a plague of frogs – there is no way either May's deal or a no deal is getting through parliament. It's also unlikely May would call a general election she stood a better than evens chance of losing. Which leaves us with a second "People's Vote", although it's far from certain there would be a parliamentary majority for that either. So we would be back where we started, praying for a miracle, or at least an extension to Article 50.

Now for the most worrying part. No one in Westminster has a clue how we get out of this mess. They may say they do, but they don't. They are merely taking every day as it comes and hoping for the best. The prime minister knows she is on borrowed time. More disturbingly, the country is rapidly coming to the same conclusion about itself.

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