Sketch: Theresa May looked on as her party put on a show of thunderous desk banging, low-level growls and blatant lies

There's a reason Tory MPs banged on desks to show their support for the Prime Minister - a fist can't fail a polygraph test

The Prime Minister being “summoned” to appear before the 1922 Committee is what counts as a big deal in the world of Conservative internal party management.

The 1922 Committee is the name that rank and file Conservative MPs give to meetings of themselves. Quite how it came to have the name the 1922 Committee is the subject of competing theories. The most plausible one is that it was chosen in the mid 1990s as part of a modernisation drive.

No one really knows what goes on in these meetings, and that very much includes those who attend them.

Its main role though is as the admin hub for coup attempts, and this being the Tory party, there needs to be clear procedures in place to manage the carnage. If the 1922 Committee chairman receives letters of ‘no confidence’ from 15 per cent of the party’s MPs, of which the current number is 48, a leadership contest is automatically triggered. But no one knows how many he has at any one time, a format that has ingeniously reduced the governing party at this impossibly significant juncture in the life of the nation to a rolling game of blindfold buckaroo, stunningly high on ego and desperately low on any kind of personal responsibility.

Which is why all week, various anonymous Tory MPs have anonymously texted journalists anonymously using really tough guy words about how much they really, really, really might anonymously topple the Prime Minister. And so she came, apparently, to “face them down”, to say “put up or shut up.”

At least that’s the theory. In reality, what happens is a bizarre piece of political stage management. The journalists wait outside. The MPs file in. Then, a few minutes later, the Prime Minister enters, and desks are banged with thunderous intensity. As if to confirm it’s all for show, even the oak doors are banged, reverberating on their hinges, so that no one waiting outside to write down what’s happening can be left in any doubt about the stunning displays of loyalty going on inside.

It’s part Darkness at Noon part Dead Poets Society. No meaning above the crass and transparently artificial is successfully transmitted through the partition. And no one behaves in a way even passably as mature as a pastiche of a highly dysfunctional public school.

The bang is chosen not merely for its volume but for its impenetrability. The percussive sound of fist on desk cannot as yet be put through a polygraph test.

This, by the way, was the meeting that according to “one former Tory Minister” the Prime Minister should “bring her own noose.” The meeting when the knife “would be heated, stuck in and twisted.”

And yet what actually happened is that they hammered on their desks like something out of the Planet of The Apes for about forty minutes before sweeping out into the corridor to declare everything was fine.

“It wasn’t Daniella in the lions den, it was a petting zoo,” said Michael Fabricant.

According to Amber Rudd, most of the Prime Minister’s remarks revolved around her staying on in the job “for the good of the country.”

But in the hours before the desk banging began, the National Audit Office published its independent report on preparations for No Deal Brexit. It made abundantly clear that the point at which the UK might have been able to get ready on time for a no deal Brexit at the end of March was passed long ago. There is now absolutely no chance of it happening. Despite one of the more popular catch phrases of the last two years, there is now absolutely no bad deal that could possibly be worse than no deal.

And she knows and they all know that they can hammer out the opening bars of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on their desks as much as they like, they can even emit some low level growls to go with it, there’s still no deal on the table that is acceptable both to Brussels and to a majority in the House of Commons.

The turkeys really are going to vote down a vegan Christmas, and there are not many recipe books left to scour for the one, elusive nut roast recipe that will persuade them otherwise.

In the meantime, on goes the game of bang bang chicken.