Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectators Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsyth.

Well, James, we're expecting a number of resignations this week. We've already had one from Sir Alan Duncan, which we will talk about shortly.

But yesterday, Philip Hammond went on The Mars show and confirmed that he

was going to resign after Theresa May's final Prime Minister's questions. He's jumping before he's

pushed, isn't he? I don't think that in the whiteboard in Boris Johnson's campaign headquarters

when they're doing the cabinet, they said, oh no, we had Hammond down for Chancellor and now he said

he won't serve. But i think it raises a more

serious point about how he has behaved i think there's a very difficult question for him to answer

which is this which is he was the chancellor when teresa may first said no deal is better than a bad

deal he was the chancellor when article 50 was invoked and teresa may kept saying that so it does raise a question about whether he was the chance of when Article 50 was invoked and Theresa May kept saying that. So it does raise a

question about whether he was ever actually committed to the policy of the day of the government

of which he was a member, whether he actually meant it. I also think he's behaving in a deeply

irresponsible manner because it is quite clear that whatever you think of it, Theresa May's

withdrawal agreement is not going to pass House Commons.

So you need the EU to offer up some kind of concession or compromise to get this thing through.

And by what he's doing and the interviews he's giving in the European press and his shenanigans in Parliament,

he is basically saying to the EU, do you don't

need to compromise or for any concession because Parliament's going to stop no deal. But as his fellow

rebel Dominic Grieve says, the only way Parliament can be absolutely certain of stopping no deal is

to bring the government down. And it is not clear yet that they have the numbers. So he is

paradoxically actually making no deal more likely. I mean, the other question

you need to think about, which is, which do you think is worse for the British economy in the short,

...