Tuition fees: which way will MPs vote on Thursday?

Today saw a weird piece of media face with an impostor conning several news outlets into reporting that Edinburgh West MP Mike Crockart was going to resign as a PPS and vote against the tuition fees increase. The impostor even got as far as being interviewed by the BBC on the World at One before the hoax was rumbled. His office said that, “Mike is still waiting to see what the final offer will be before he votes and that has always been our line”.

(Ironically just before this took place, I was in Millbank to appear on the BBC’s Daily Politics Show and was joking with the floor manager about how they were double-checking that I was indeed me. As he said, “After the taxi driver incident…” though actually the taxi driver wasn’t a taxi driver.)

Norman Baker has also been in the news today, having publicly confirmed that he has not yet made up his mind which way to vote (and therefore may resign as a minister, if he decides to vote against rather than abstain).

Charles Kennedy and Ming Campbell’s intentions to vote against have also been firmed up in the last couple of days.

Meanwhile, Greg Mulholland, in an interview on the BBC during which his feet appeared to be on fire (smoke kept on bellowing up from the bottom of the screen), called for the vote on Thursday to be delayed prior to a wider review. So far he is a lone voice on this, and other people who earlier in the year were pondering the merit of a wider review first are not supporting his call.

People have also gone off the idea of trying to unite around a mass abstention, which was the focus of speculation last week.