BRITISH PM MAY TO FACE NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE.

LONDON • British Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to be told Wednesday she will face a “vote of no confidence” among Conservative MPS after the intervention of a senior former cabinet minister.

Owen Paterson, a former Northern Ireland and environment secretary who backed Leave in the referendum, wrote Tuesday to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Conservative MPS, formally stating he had lost confidence in May.

There was growing speculation Tuesday night that Brady had now received the 48 letters required to trigger a vote, which is expected to lead to a full-scale leadership contest in the coming weeks. A vote on May’s leadership could now take place among Tory MPS as early as next week. If she loses the vote, a leadership contest is expected to be held during the Christmas holidays.

Meantime, May will meet with her cabinet Wednesday morning amid calls from some Tory MPS for senior ministers to intervene and replace her with a caretaker leader before a formal vote is called on the Brexit deal with Europe. May made a whirlwind tour Tuesday of European capitals to try to win further concessions on her deal to pull Britain from the European Union, a day after her plan’s unpopularity led her to postpone the key parliamentary vote.

But the issue that has made the Brexit deal politically toxic in Britain is non-negotiable on the European side. May was snubbed by a succession of EU leaders Tuesday as they insisted there would be no renegotiation of the Irish border backstop.

Reflecting spiking European fears that Britain could crash out of the EU without a deal, the chief EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, urged colleagues to speed their preparations for the humanitarian and economic crisis that would ensue.

Leaders offered kind words to May and said they would do everything they could to help her sell the deal to the British parliament, but they refused to back down from an ironclad backup plan to ensure there will never be a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

“There is no room whatsoever for renegotiation,” European Commission President Jean-claude Juncker told the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday. “Ireland will never be left alone.”

Declaring himself “astonished” at May’s inability to master her domestic politics, Juncker said Europeans could give “further clarifications and further interpretations” to help ease the British debate — diplomatic code for declarations that could be politically symbolic but ultimately will not be substantive or binding.

EU leaders plan to discuss Brexit on Thursday during a scheduled summit in Brussels. European ministers gathered ahead of that meeting said, one after another, that they could imagine no change in the fundamentals of the deal.