Will any Brexiter ministers quit?

The Prime Minister has a knack of consistently outsmarting the clever-clogs boys in her cabinet - presumably because they underestimate her.

So, for example, today it looks highly likely that she will secure cabinet agreement for a Brexit vision or plan that is a million miles from what Johnson, Gove, Fox and Davis thought they would land when they led that victorious campaign to take the UK out of the EU.

As you'll know, if you've been following my daily episodes of this everyday tale of mayhem, backstabbing and parliamentary jurisprudence in SW1, the 120-odd pages of Brexit policy that ministers were sent yesterday - and that are supposed to be crunched next week into a White Paper - outline a permanent role for the European Court of Justice in adjudicating whether the UK is following EU standards for the manufacture of goods and the production of food, envision the UK collecting tariffs on behalf of the EU in perpetuity, and presage permanent payments running to billions of pounds into EU coffers.

This is not the "taking back of control" Gove, Johnson and the others insisted Brexit would deliver.

One of them, Johnson, more-or-less admitted as much last night to the former PM David Cameron when they had a drink in that swanky Tory refuge in SW1, the Carlton Club.

In the course of the confab, Cameron became convinced Johnson would not be quitting today, even though failure to do so would see the Foreign Secretary collaborating on a plan that many Brexiters would view as worse than staying in the EU, for its combination of ceded sovereignty and sub-optimal economics.

Why wouldn't Johnson and the rest make today their last stand? Their die-in-ditch battle for a supposedly independent British future - which they would probably say is more important than whether their party wins an election (and perhaps rightly so, in that Brexit is forever)?

Well, in running away after failing to change her mind, they might reinforce the image of the PM as rather tougher than them - and she wouldn't complain about that.

For a few days (though probably no longer), she might even look stronger for their departure.

Another reason is that they are (understandably) sceptical that the rest of the EU will agree to what the PM wants. So why should they resign over a policy that may turn out, and soon, to be an utter irrelevance?

But that would be to hold both the government and the system of government in contempt.

There is something profoundly alienating when ministers sign up for policies they detest and only because they don't expect those policies to become law.

So if they stay, they must know that the PM and the country would expect them to enthusiastically, consistently and repeatedly endorse and promote her ambitions for Britain in its future relationship with the EU - even though those ambitions include reneging on pledges they made just a couple of years ago in the most important exercise in direct democracy this country has known.

The cabinet's Brexiters are confronting a once-in-a-career test of their consciences.