May says she will not lead Conservatives into next UK election
British Prime Minister Theresa May confirmed on Thursday that she would not lead her divided Conservative Party into the next general election.
After winning a no-confidence vote in her leadership, Mrs May said she would be seeking legal assurances on the backstop plan to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland in an attempt to win over her own MPs into supporting her Brexit withdrawal agreement.
But both Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and French President Emmanuel Macron said there was no hope of renegotiating the agreement.
Mrs May said she did not expect “an immediate breakthrough” on the issue but hoped to get assurances that the backstop was temporary, something which would “assuage” concerns from members of her party who wanted her gone.
Mrs May was supported by 200 of her Conservative colleagues in the confidence ballot but a sizeable number, 117, voted to oust her.
Her political survival was greeted with a mixture of pragmatism and weary relief by senior EU figures, who said that they would intensify planning for a future without a deal on their post-Brexit relationship after the unconvincing victory for Mrs May hours earlier.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, welcomed her victory and said he would look forward to welcoming Mrs May to the leaders’ summit. “Glad about the outcome of tonight’s vote in the UK,” he tweeted.
Despite Mrs May facing down rebels in her own party, EU leaders signalled that she cannot expect any major concessions to help push her vision of Brexit through a sceptical UK parliament.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had no intention of changing the exit agreement. Senior EU officials publicly backed Mr Varadkar, who has refused to budge on the issue of the future of the border between EU member Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. He said on Thursday there was no other “credible fallback” option that could replace the backstop plan which is detested by Conservative Party rebels.
In a sign that he wished to bypass Mrs May’s government, Mr Varadkar floated the idea to Sky News that parliament could revoke Article 50 in order to allow more time for Brexit talks.
Mrs May cancelled a vote on the deal in parliament this week when it became clear she would face a heavy defeat, triggering the Conservative rebels’ no-confidence vote.
Dutch daily de Volkskrant described her victory as a “Houdini act” but said that EU leaders no longer wanted to be held hostage by the political drama in London.
Guy Verhofstadt, the Brexit co-ordinator for the European parliament, said he believed the vote showed that a “disastrous no-deal” was off the table, but said that the EU would intensify contingency planning for that scenario.
“Once again, the fate of EU-UK relations, the prosperity of businesses and citizens’ rights are consumed by an internal Conservative party catfight over Europe,” he tweeted.
German daily Die Welt said Mrs May was offering her party “the impossible” because of the refusal of EU leaders to budge.
In a sign that the bloc was looking to post-Brexit horizons, leaders were more focused on welcoming plans for an EU-Japan free-trade deal scheduled to come into force next year than they were on Mrs May’s political survival.
December is pantomime season in Britain. In theatres across the country, children watch adaptations of fairy tales, in which actors perform slapstick comedy and tell old jokes to the audience. A standard feature of the genre is when the villain skulks onto the stage, unnoticed by the main character. The crowd shouts, “Behind you!”, and the hero gets a fright, but always survives.
Pantomime season has also opened in the House of Commons, where a number of MPs have been loudly warning Prime Minister Theresa May that hardline Eurosceptics within the Conservative party were plotting her demise. This campaign to unseat Mrs May culminated on Wednesday night in a confidence vote among her own MPs.
The conspirators failed. Mrs May won the vote by 200 to 117. This means that she has the trust of almost two-thirds of her party, but none from a third of them. She has survived as prime minister and no further challenge is possible for a year. But the backstabbing is not over, and now the Brexit pantomime is entering its final act.
Yesterday, Mrs May spoke with her Irish counterpart and European leaders, in the hope of miraculously renegotiating some part of the complex deal she agreed with the EU last month. EU leaders are adamant that renegotiation is not an option, although they may offer a pleasantly worded additional document to help Mrs May stagger on to her self-imposed deadline of March 29, 2019.
However, Brexit may not happen at all now. There is no deal that commands majority parliamentary support. Some MPs want a hard or no-deal Brexit, some accept Mrs May’s version, others fantasise about a Norway deal, while many simply want to remain in the EU.
Mrs May, like Conservative leaders before her, is trying to appease the hardline leave faction − the ones who have just tried and failed to overthrow her − by winning concessions from the EU. That mission, however, now looks impossible.
Appeasing her right-wing Conservative critics − who have come together since 1993 as the euphemistically named European Research Group – has not worked and never will.
That’s because Brexit has never been about what is best for Britain. It has always been a violent ideological feud within the Conservative party itself. As the Conservative Attorney General Geoffrey Cox put it, the vote to unseat Theresa May was another “self-indulgent spasm”. Meanwhile, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, of the Scottish National Party, summed it up perfectly. “The UK is facing chaos and crisis entirely because of a vicious civil war within the Tory party,” she said. “What a self-centred bunch they are.”
The Conservative party always saw itself as the “party of business”, of competence and of “the Union” that binds together the interests and identities of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Now, its self-seeking infighting has jeopardised each of these claims. This government has dismayed business leaders, emboldened the independence movement in Scotland, and given plenty of encouragement to those in Northern Ireland who wish to secede from the UK and become part of a unified Ireland.
This whole sorry story began back in the 1990s, when the Conservative prime minister John Major faced similar attacks to those that have been carried out on Mrs May. They came from Eurosceptic colleagues with powerful friends in right-wing think tanks and newspapers, especially the Daily
Mail and those owned by Rupert Murdoch, who helped to spread anti-EU ideas for many years.
When David Cameron became prime minister in 2010, he pandered to demands that he pull his party out of the most important conservative grouping in the European parliament, the EPP – much to the dismay of Angela Merkel and other centre-right leaders. Cameron appeased the Europhobes once again by promising the 2016 referendum on EU membership.
When Mr Cameron lost the referendum, he handed a poisoned chalice to Mrs May, who tried to balance negotiating a Brexit deal with the EU and mollifying the right-wingers who had undermined both her Conservative predecessors.
Yet again, those attempts at compromise have not worked. Mrs May is now a prime minister viewed as profoundly weak at home and pitied abroad. She may achieve minor EU concessions, but the 117 Conservative MPs who opposed her leadership are unlikely to be impressed with any of them.
Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Scottish National Party remain implacably hostile, and Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party is not especially helpful to her cause. It is difficult – almost impossible – to see how any Brexit deal negotiated by Mrs May can succeed in parliament.
That leaves only two options: no deal, or no Brexit. The nodeal scenario is one of economic and political suicide and unacceptable to most MPs. So, now, when the crowd calls out “behind you”, Mrs May is likely to find a second referendum looking over her. A People’s Vote seems to be the only final act that could make any sense in Britain’s Brexit pantomime.