Not when the mild air is returning from the NW they haven't 

The core of heights is to our West and the Scandi High is poorly orientated for anything other than brief foot in the door cold.

Well one thing appears to be fairly certain from all I can see, and that is that the outlook as currently indicated by the models, looks far from mild and considerably different to what has been commonplace in the past few winters.

I believe it is the longest run (~2 weeks) of programmed cold weather in the 850 ensembles. It will be cold surely. But I suspect one or two "mildies" are compensating for some of the cold spin. For example your -12C is for individual perturbations which we have had several times this winter. Nevertheless with the mean running around -5C to -7C for much of the two weeks it wouldn't take much of a dip to get snow at short notice as you say.

Saturday continues to look very interesting.

That's not the METO view and doesn't even look marginal to me.

I'm assuming that's the occlusion grinding to a halt Brian with cold air ahead and behind? It's marginal but fingers crossed!

Yes I think so. I noticed earlier that Arpege had picked up on it. UKM forecasts often follow Arpege VERY closely so I would expect snow warnings to start going out quite soon.

Yup - this has to be one of the most remarkable charts I've ever seen - not for sheer depth of cold, but simply because I can't recall a situation where we've had -10C from the east while simultaneously having a large wodge of -10C from the NW.... that, to me, would seem a recipe for a snowfest where the two airmasses meet!

I've also been scratching my head looking at the charts, pretty rare setup that's for sure!

If you squint, you can just see the line of cold rain down the middle of the chart over Portsmouth 

One thing is for sure is that the snow fest will not occur over Kingston Upon Thames. Brian's map shows just rain albeit fairly light south of the M4

Not by that time point. Snow all the way to the south coast and beyond, right down into Brittany on the TWO chart viewer.

Even the snow depth charts show lying snow right to the south coast, within the limits of the low-resolution blockiness.

A pretty spectacular GFS 6z all the way through to day 16. 

We end the FI on the 06z Op run of the GFS on a very cold zonal note with cold air very close too us which could give a major snow event as the battle takes place meanwhile at least we have a dry few days between Saturday and Tuesday and some frosts to look forward to esp for the south with perhaps the odd flurry in the south east early next week, but with all the Polar vortex lows over Greenland HP will struggle to build to the north east sadly:

The latter stages of the GFS are also quite fun to look at, total fantasy of course but it ends with virtually the entire British Isles (and indeed much of Europe) snow covered. A big contrast to the T0 chart which shows the dire lack of snow cover across Europe right now.

A truly Icelandic chart. The point at which it doesn't even matter if the west or east wins because both are frigid.