At 6pm last Wednesday, the Tory MP for Eddisbury, Cheshire, Antoinette Sandbach, rose to her feet in the Commons and called on her Labour counterpart Chuka Umunna, who was progressing serenely through a speech, to offer her some badly needed support. “Does the honourable gentleman agree that it is deeply insulting for those who have time and again voted against their prime minister and their government to suggest in this crucial bill, which will help to set the future course of this country, that it would be wrong for us to do the proper scrutiny and to apply for votes in this house?”

It was a remarkable moment. Here was a Tory MP asking a senior Labour member to condemn some of her fellow Tories for behaving shamefully and hypocritically. Umunna duly obliged.

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The Commons had been debating Brexit for five hours. Tempers were fraying. At times there was more unity breaking out between members of different parties than there was within them. Minutes earlier the Conservative veteran Bernard Jenkin, a hard Brexiter and formerly a serial rebel against the Maastricht treaty (which he had argued in the early 1990s represented a grave threat to the sovereignty of parliament), had accused some MPs on his own side of “trying to delay” the UK’s exit from the EU by arguing for a vote on the eventual Brexit deal.

The likes of Sandbach – one of those branded “mutineers” over the previous weeks by the pro-Brexit Tory press – were not prepared to sit back and take it any longer. If Jenkin and others had made it their life’s work to defend parliamentary sovereignty from the clutches of Brussels, how could they be arguing now that the same parliament should be denied a right to scrutinise and vote on the most important issue to have come before it in decades?

Despite the best efforts of the Tory whips to force their rebel MPs into line, discipline in the party had disintegrated. Principle was beginning to trump party loyalty and the threats of the increasingly ineffective whips counted for nothing.

“The whips tried to tell us we’d be responsible for landing the country with a Marxist government under Jeremy Corbyn à la Daily Mail. What bollocks,” said one rebel. “No one really thinks that defeats over Brexit will bring down the government. The DUP will have to desert before that happens and they won’t because there is only one thing the DUP wants less than a hard border in Ireland – and that is Corbyn.”

Less than an hour and a half after Sandbach rose to her feet, she and 10 other Conservative opponents of a hard Brexit held their nerve and rebelled. The 11 voted with the opposition parties in support of an amendment tabled by the former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve that will ensure (unless ministers succeed in removing it later in the parliamentary process) that MPs have a vote to approve the eventual deal. The pro-Brexiters fear it will, in effect, give MPs a veto.

The dramatic events saw Theresa May’s first defeat over the Brexit bill in the Commons and, seemingly, represented a terrible humiliation for her. But, maybe more important, they also marked a shocking, sobering reverse for the hardline, hard-Brexit Tory right.

Has the tide turned against them? All the hardline Brexiters could do in the following hours was to launch fresh assaults on the 11 rebels, accusing them (wrongly) of celebrating wildly and toasting their success with champagne in the Pugin Room at Westminster. The reality was that they had gathered, exhausted, over a glass of wine for a very sombre post-match analysis of where events of the last few hours had left them, the country, and the tangled mess that is Brexit.

As rebels reel from Twitter death threats, they are vowing in private to impose more defeats on the government

Next morning, as the recriminations gave way to more sensible reflection, many agreed a vital corner had been turned. One senior Tory MP said that it had not been so much a humiliation for May as her liberation. “What the vote showed was that there is nothing to be gained for her from continuing to appease the hardline Brexiters. She has done that for too long. She was imprisoned by them. Now it must be clear to her that if she continues along that road, she will be defeated again and again. The hard Brexiters are not important any more. They are outnumbered. The collective view of parliament is what is important, not one extreme faction within. The only way to make progress towards a sensible Brexit is to go with the majority.”

Umunna, who had been instrumental in marshalling cross-party support behind the Grieve amendment, said that attempts to intimidate Tory MPs, not least by the Tory press, had backfired and had merely emboldened the rebels. “The use of inflammatory and threatening language by elements of the rightwing press against these parliamentarians – who have committed the crime of disagreeing with others’ views on the national interest – is grossly irresponsible, dangerous and has a whiff of the 1930s about it.”

Other Labour MPs heaped praise on the Tory rebels, particularly Grieve, hailing them as national heroes. One said: “What he did was bold and brave in the face of a torrent of abuse and his motives continually being questioned, ironically by Tory MPs who have a history of extreme disloyalty towards Tory leaders. Had he not held his nerve, the whole rebellion would have disintegrated. He has done a huge service to the country and his constituents.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa May suffered her first defeat over the Brexit bill in the Commons. Photograph: Stephanie Lecocq/EPA

This weekend, as the rebels reel from Twitter death threats and insults from those angered by their actions in the country, they are vowing in private to carry on and impose more defeats on the government if needs be. Already it seems they have forced May to compromise over her plan to insert a fixed date for Brexit into the withdrawal bill, to avoid another Commons defeat this week.

While the date will remain in place, it is understood that allowance will be made for it to be shifted back if more time is needed to complete negotiations. Pro-Brexit MPs on Tory and Labour benches are worried that they are losing the influence, and key arguments. Labour’s Frank Field said he was very uneasy about the so-called compromise, as Tories of like mind would be. “Any wriggle room like this will just be exploited by the Remainers,” he said.

For the moment, the argument is slipping away from the hardliners in favour of moderate Brexiters. Nothing demonstrated this more vividly than May’s trip to Brussels on Friday when she signed off an agreement with the 27 other member states that will allow trade talks to begin – but in return for her agreeing, in effect, that the UK will sign up to what will be another two years of EU membership beyond March 2019.

If there is to be a two-year transition deal, which May insists there must be, it will be on the EU’s terms, with European Court of Justice oversight and freedom of movement continuing to apply to the UK.

This weekend, with the tide turning against their vision of a fast and clean Brexit, the Tory hardline Brexiters are desperately trying to regroup – both in the cabinet and on the backbenches. In recent years they have got used to having things their way, to forcing Tory prime ministers to bow to their will. They pushed David Cameron into committing to a Brexit referendum in the first place, then persuaded the country to back leaving the EU. Under May they thought they had secured her commitment to a hard Brexit. But now, most moderate MPs believe, they may be losing sway just as the real arguments approach over the precise shape that Brexit will take.

So if the numbers are not there in the Commons, and as the largely pro-Remain House of Lords prepares to scrutinise the withdrawal bill, where do the hard Brexiters go now to claw back the initiative?

Some at the extreme end of the spectrum seem intent on whipping the country up into a frenzy of anger against the “traitors” – hoping to foster a hard Brexit revolution in the nation at large. One hardline Brexiter told the Observer that the rebels had got themselves into such trouble in their constituencies that they were at serious risk of de-selection. The only way forward was to show them compassion. “We have to feel sorry for them,” he said. “We gave them this compromise over the date of Brexit because they were in a terrible position and they needed our help. It was a way to help get them off the hook.”

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The reality is that it is the hard Brexiters who should be most worried. Senior figures among them, including their leaders in the cabinet, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, seemed determined to give the impression of calm, as they prepare for a series of cabinet meetings, which begin this week, on the “end destination” of Brexit. In the meantime, they are biding their time. The key phrase being deployed among senior Brexiters is: “Eyes on the prize.” Just ensure Brexit happens. Everything else can be dealt with later.

Ironically, given the difficulties that Ireland has created for the process, one Brexit tactician explained that they were taking lessons from Irish independence. Once the Irish free state was declared in 1922, they say, there was a momentum that inevitably led to a full republic being declared by 1949, ending any British involvement.

“There is a ratchet effect to having your own state,” said one influential Brexiter. “One by one, the things that weren’t acceptable to the sovereignty of the Irish free state got cut away, stage by stage. That’s what we need to do. The moment we are out of the EU, everything will be in our own hands. People try to say that our hands will be bound. In the end, they won’t be.”

The battle beyond parliament

Big business

Major groups had focused on securing the transitional agreement. They will want that finalised early in the new year, before turning their attention to the final deal. The CBI says the UK should be as close as possible to current arrangements, with immigration to be a key battleground.

The City

Britain’s huge financial services sector will hope the UK achieves a first by securing an EU trade deal with a high degree of access for financial services firms. Many accept they will not get full access (“passporting rights”), and are preparing contingency plans in case of a hard Brexit. They expect the Treasury to fight their corner.

The media

The Brexit-supporting press mostly backed Theresa May, as she finally secured trade talks with the EU, largely by conceding ground to Brussels over money, the role of the European court of justice and the Irish border. It suggests they will not push her towards hard Brexit, and will back her against rebel MPs. Whether they endorse the final deal May is handed will be a big moment.

Popular campaigns

Popular movements on both sides of the debate are likely to become noisier. Leave campaign donor Arron Banks has vowed to fund a pro-Brexit movement, though it has not yet come to pass. Remain rallies will pressure wavering MPs for a softer Brexit as crunch votes in the Commons approach next year. Prepare for a year of political marches.