Party coup try caps nightmare week for British prime minister
LONDON — With crucial German and French elections out of the way, this was the moment when talks on Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union were supposed to get serious.
Yet, while things look steadier in Berlin and Paris, Britain is suffering repeated aftershocks from last year’s referendum decision to quit the 28-nation bloc, the latest of them threatening to engulf its prime minister, Theresa May, who is fresh off a calamitous, accident-strewn speech Wednesday.
On Friday, Ms. May, who presides over a warring Cabinet, faced down a coup attempt from a group of her own lawmakers after the debacle at her Conservative Party’s annual conference, where her speech was interrupted by a prankster and she was plagued by a persistent cough and a malfunctioning stage set.
“You can’t just carry on when things aren’t working,” Grant Shapps, a former chairman of the party, told the BBC, as he called for Ms. May to stand aside. “The solution is not to bury heads in the sand,” added Mr. Shapps, who claimed to have support from around 30 fellow plotters, including five former Cabinet ministers.
But it was not at all clear that a change of leadership could help resolve the arguments over Brexit, as the withdrawal is known, that are tearing apart the Conservatives, or that it would leave the government any more prepared to negotiate with the European Union.
The week was in almost all respects the worst of all worlds for Ms. May and the beleaguered Tories. As the pound sterling sank amid the political chaos and increasingly downbeat economic news, Ms. May’s desperate political weakness risked undermining her credibility as a negotiating partner.
“In the European Union they are looking at this in an incredulous way, wondering how they are managing to go so deep into chaos,” said Ulrike Franke, a policy fellow in Berlin for the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research institute, adding that Britain’s political problems would be amusing if they were not so serious.
The continental news media, too, have noticed that the British government is falling apart. Germany’s Bild newspaper described Ms. May as a “laughingstock,” headlining another article: “Brexit-Lady gone by Christmas?”
The more cerebral Süddeutsche Zeitung noted that Ms. May “was damaged and she will stay so until she fails, gives up or someone dares to come out of the wood,” adding: “This moment may come soon.”
Ms. May had intended to use her party conference speech to relaunch her leadership after she gambled by calling an early general election in June, and lost both her parliamentary majority and her personal authority.
At the election Ms. May asked voters to endorse her “strong and stable leadership” and — that slogan having turned speedily into a bad joke — on Friday she offered “calm” leadership as she insisted she was staying in Downing Street.
The mood in her party is anything but calm, however, and on Friday Cabinet ministers moved to shore up the prime minister. Those doing so included the environment secretary, Michael Gove, whose track record for loyalty has been spotty to put it mildly. (Mr. Gove was described as a “political serial killer” last year after breaking first with the previous prime minister, David Cameron, a friend, and then with his pro-Brexit ally Boris Johnson.)
The Cabinet is divided between those who want a clean break with the European Union — a hard Brexit — and those who hope for a softer departure to cushion the economy. When a consensus started to emerge from the Cabinet, before a speech last month by Ms. May in Florence, Italy, Mr. Johnson, the foreign secretary, undermined it by outlining his own, more hardline and upbeat vision of Brexit in a 4,000-word article.