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U.K.’s May under pressure after loss
Prime Minister Theresa May’s top advisers resign after her party loses seats in election.
LONDON — The pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May to step aside after a humiliating election grew Saturday, with her two top aides resigning, a leading newspaper pronouncing her “fatally wounded” and a former minister acknowledging that Conservatives were plotting possible replacements via the messaging service WhatsApp.
The aides who resigned, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, May’s co-chiefs of staff, had been widely blamed within the prime minister’s party for the lackluster campaign that ended with the Conservatives losing their majority in Parliament.
Their departures were seen Saturday as a Downing Street bid to stave off May’s resignation.
But it was unclear whether it would be enough, with some Conservatives acknowledging that May has effectively become a lame-duck leader after Thursday election, which was supposed to give her a mandate for the next five years.
May has insisted she will not step aside, and will instead form a new government that will lead the country through Brexit talks, which are scheduled to begin June 19.
Several senior members of her Conservative Party have backed her, saying the country can’t afford the chaos of starting to pick a new leader only days before negotiations with European leaders are to kick off.
Behind the scenes the party is debating whether to push for May’s ouster — if not now, then perhaps in several months after Britain’s EU divorce talks have launched.
If May does move out of 10 Downing Street, it would be the second time in the past year that Britain has been left leaderless after a prime minister gambled and lost in calling a national vote. May came to office last summer after her predecessor, David Cameron, called a referendum on an exit from the European Union, a move he opposed. The referendum passed, and Cameron resigned the next day.
The question of whether May will stay on is taking longer to answer — at least in part because no one expected her to lose Thursday.
Downing Street announced Saturday night that the Conservatives had agreed in principle to a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland that will give May an extremely narrow majority in Parliament. While that technically means she has the necessary votes to carry on, she will have to step down if enough Conservatives move against her.
May’s party won 318 seats Thursday, 12 fewer than it had before May called a snap election, and eight short of the 326 needed for an outright majority. The Democratic Unionist Party has 10 seats in Parliament. The main opposition Labour Party won 262 seats.
The Conservatives have a history of unsentimentally sacking their leaders — Margaret Thatcher among them — when they have become more liability than asset.
In an indication of just how quickly the mood in the party’s inner sanctum was turning against May, a former senior Downing Street aide told the BBC Saturday that May’s office had been “dysfunctional” and “toxic.”
Katie Perrior, who was until recently the prime minister’s director of communications, also implied that May was out of her depth after being elevated from home secretary to prime minister last July.
“Trying to make that change to Number 10 was more difficult than she possibly anticipated,” Perrior said.
Perrior called May “a good person,” but blamed Hill and Timothy, who have been the prime minister’s closest advisers and were at the heart of a Downing Street operation that many in the party saw as controlling and exclusionary.
The BBC reported that May had been warned by senior party lawmakers that unless Hill and Timothy were ousted, the prime minister would face an internal party challenge to her leadership by Monday.
In her resignation statement, Hill said she had “no doubt at all that Theresa May will continue to serve and work hard as prime minister — and do it brilliantly.”