THERESA MAY GIVES UP
British prime minister will step aside over Brexit failure
LONDON — An iconic image of Theresa May appeared this week, as Britain readied for the news that she would step down.
It showed her in the back of her car, her face pale and sheened with sweat, her eyes red-rimmed and watery.
The image resonated because it was nearly identical to one taken of Margaret Thatcher in November of 1990, as a car whisked her away from her own resignation.
“Tears in the Back Seat,” read the Daily Mirror’s headline, on both days.
The tears were notable because they were out of the ordinary. In two years and 10 months as prime minister, May has made toughness into a personal brand, plowing forward even as her hopes of delivering Brexit faded.
It became one of the central mysteries of British politics: What exactly would it take for May to give up?
On Friday, we found out. She said she would stand aside as leader of the Conservative Party on June 7, but remain as prime minister until a successor was chosen.
Contemplating a fourth humiliating defeat in parliament, abandoned by the last of her allies, May at last concluded she had exhausted every possible pathway to success.
Her Brexit strategy has left the country in dire straits: Its populace is poisonously divided, its two venerable parties are gravely damaged and her likely successors are pushing the hard-line fantasy of a no-deal exit.
She has, to date, served 1,044 days in office, one of the shortest tenures of any postwar prime minister, and her government has passed fewer pieces of legislation than any other in the last three decades.
As May steps down in comprehensive defeat, it is in large part because she was slow to adjust to the political realities of Brexit.
Though she ultimately made clear that she was not willing to lead the country into a no-deal exit, she did so only this spring, at the tail end of the process.
Though she finally reached out beyond her own party, in hopes of cobbling together a coalition with Labour centrists, she did so tentatively, and too late.
“She missed her moment,” said Rosa Prince, the author of a biography of May.
“She just didn’t have the flexibility or insight to change course. She’s like a tanker that takes forever to change direction, and then can’t recalibrate when it’s clear the new course is fatal.”
This was not the way May’s story was supposed to end.
On the heels of the 2016 referendum, she appealed, to many, as a safe pair of hands, a dutiful public servant who might be able to steer the country toward compromise.
The daughter of a small-town vicar, May seemed to hail from a simpler, more old-fashioned England.
A political loner, she belonged to none of Westminster’s political camps, so was unlikely to be drawn into back-channel squabbles or conspiracy.
But in the years ahead, those virtues would prove to be her undoing.
At the outset of the negotiation, she accepted the assurances of leading Brexiteers that the negotiations would be easy, and, as a negotiating tool, declared that she was prepared to leave without a deal, said Chris Wilkins, who worked as her speech writer and chief strategist for her first year in office.
“All of the rhetoric from the Brexiteers and from the Leave campaign, if you remember, it was about how easy it was going to be,” Wilkins said.
“She was being told this isn’t going to be that complicated.”
It was during this time that she laid down a series of “red lines” — aiming to reassure Tory Brexiteers that she was on their side — that would fatally restrict her room to manoeuvre.
In a major policy speech in January 2017, she promised to break free of the European Union’s economic structures and to exit the European Court of Justice, and promised that, if necessary, she was ready to leave on March 29, 2019, with no agreement in place.
That pledge — “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain” — was a victory for hard-line Brexiteers, bringing their thinking into the Tory mainstream.
“It was very important, and it wasn’t one speech; she said it consistently,” said John Redwood, an anti-Europe voice in parliament for decades.
May’s tough talk, in the early stages of negotiation, set her up for a bitter falling out with Brexiteers in her own party.
In the soaring rhetoric of the referendum, they had glossed over a stubborn problem: Leaving the European customs union, which eliminated tariff barriers on goods, would mean creating a physical border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, a member of the European Union.
Nearly two years would pass before May made public her solution to the border conundrum. The so-called Irish backstop would keep the country inside a customs union — with Northern Ireland subject to additional European Union regulation — until a better solution was found, most likely new technology or another form of trading arrangement.
This compromise was reviled, by Remainers and Brexiteers alike, as the worst of both worlds, a Britain that was neither in, nor fully out, of the European Union.
Brexiteers, in particular, felt May had abandoned her original commitments, and feared Britain could be stuck in the backstop for years, obliged to abide by European rules but unable to cut its own trade deals.
May appealed to the warring factions to let go of their polarized beliefs, telling parliament late last year: “This argument has gone on long enough.”
“It is corrosive to our politics,” she said. “And life depends on compromise.”
But her reserves of trust in parliament were exhausted, and her strategy of pressuring lawmakers by running down the clock backfired spectacularly.