Yet again an embattled Theresa May has survived to fight another day as Britain’s Prime Minister, seeing off on Wednesday a motion of no confidence in her government tabled by the country’s main opposition Labor party.
It was a foregone conclusion that she would — Conservative lawmakers and their allies in the small Northern Irish party that sustains May’s minority government were never going to vote with the opposition parties, political commentators argued beforehand. Bringing down May’s government would have inevitably triggered a general election — one Conservatives couldn’t be sure of winning.
In more normal times, though, May would have resigned before Wednesday’s no-confidence debate on her government.
The day before she endured the biggest parliamentary reversal ever handed a prime minister in British history with 432 lawmakers — including a third of her own ruling Conservative party — refusing to endorse her highly contentious Brexit deal, her bid to square the circle between those wanting a total break with the EU and those wanting Britain to remain a member of the bloc or at least closely aligned to it.
Tuesday’s parliamentary vote has pushed Britain deeper into a political labyrinth that no one seems to know how to navigate, least of all May, who doesn’t have a track record of bi-partisanship. Only 202 lawmakers backed her draft plan, itself the result of two-years of ill-tempered haggling with European Union leaders.
She had been warned for months the deal would not get a House of Commons seal of approval, but she insisted on bringing it up for a vote in her bid to bend an unenthusiastic parliament to her will. Convinced, her critics said, that her brinkmanship would be rewarded.
The previous ignominious record-holder for parliamentary rebuffs was Ramsay MacDonald, a Labor prime minister who lost a vote by 166 in 1924. He bowed to convention and resigned, triggering a general election, which he then lost.
But these are anything but normal times in Britain and May offered no regrets nor hint she had considered resigning.
Brexit has rancorously divided the country down the middle and fractured political parties into quarrelsome unyielding factions. It also has upended a political rulebook better suited for more stable times. Long-established procedures and conventions are increasingly being cast aside as Theresa May, cabinet ministers and lawmakers, both Brexiters and those who want to remain in the EU, battle desperately how to part company with the bloc.
Last week, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the flamboyant John Bercow, accepted, to the fury of government supporters, a parliamentary maneuver by pro-EU Conservative rebels and Labor backers that centuries of precedence dictated he should not. “If we were guided only by precedent, nothing would ever change,” he sniffed.
Bercow, an ardent anti-Brexiter, was accused of trying to scupper Britain’s exit from the EU, set for March 29, but his position was that he was trying to giving parliament a greater say over what should be done, allowing it to try to plot a way out of the political deadlock that Brexit has become.
In the high political drama that’s playing out with just 71 days left before Britain is scheduled to leave the EU — with or without an approved deal with Brussels — one key question is what is driving Theresa May?
Aside from Tuesday’s crushing defeat, her tenure at Downing Street has witnessed a series of startling setbacks that would have prompted other prime ministers to quit.
She gambled in 2017 by calling a snap election, hoping to secure a larger majority for the Conservatives only to see Labor dash her hopes, leaving her heading a precariously positioned minority government. She has drawn emphatic ‘red lines’ with EU negotiators only to be forced to cave when confronted with firm resistance from Brussels or outrage from hardline Brexiters or Europhiles in her own party.
Three Brexit ministers and eleven other members of her government have resigned over policy differences. That’s another record for a prime minister. And she has lost half-dozen crucial Brexit-related votes in as many weeks. Her cabinet is hopelessly split. Brexit has consumed so much of the government’s energy that it has mismanaged a series of other challenges, including the aftermath of the 2017 fire that consumed the Grenfell Tower residential block in London.