Europe’s effect on Conservative Party leaders

Divisions over Europe have ultimately cost the job of every British Conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher.

The Theresa May confidence vote yesterday would at best mean she lives to fight another day. The great dividing line in the most successful political party in the western world cannot be healed so readily.

While Mrs May has repeatedly promised that she will deliver the UK exit from Europe on March 29, the challenge she faces has welled up from the ranks of the most hardline supporters of Brexit.

Since she assumed the leadership in 2016, Mrs May has been dogged by her remain stance in the referendum that June. Brexiters do not believe she will deliver at the ultimate hour.

David Cameron resigned after the referendum was lost in 2016. He had promised to call the vote as a political tactic to squeeze support for the United Kingdom Independence Party before the 2015 election.

It was a very successful gambit but once he had a majority in the House of Commons, he was honour-bound to call the vote that blew up his leadership. Mr Cameron yesterday tweeted that Mrs May had his full support.

John Major, the prime minister for six and a half years in the 1990s, fought a series of showdowns against Eurosceptics who opposed the euro and the creation of the EU. He called a leadership vote against himself to ease the pressure.

He won but the turmoil continued. It was all too much for the electorate who handed a landslide victory to Tony Blair in the 1997 election.

While Mrs Thatcher was a champion of the EU single market, her antipathy to Brussels as it tried to launch the euro and forge “ever closer union” at the political level at the end of the Cold War hastened her demise. Senior Cabinet ministers rebelled against the leader.

Under the rules at the time, prime ministers had to win a confidence vote by a clear margin. But on a visit to Paris Mrs Thatcher fell four votes short of an outright first-round victory. Defiant, she declared: “I fight on, I fight to win.” Within days she was gone. The Conservatives chose leaders through a so-called magic circle until the mid-1960s. Senior figures, known as the men in grey suits, would visit an outgoing leader to deliver the message that time was up.

The introduction of leadership ballots has since led to Conservative prime ministers and opposition leaders ousted as soon as the inevitability of election defeat becomes obvious.

That is the reality that has hung over Mrs May for almost all of her premiership.