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The Theresa May Survival Guide


British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks outside 10 Downing street in London, Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2019.

British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks outside 10 Downing street in London, Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2019.


Photo:

Frank Augstein/Associated Press

Say what you will about Theresa May—and you might as well because everyone else has—the British Prime Minister can take a punch. On Wednesday she survived a no-confidence vote in Parliament, 325-306, only 24 hours after the same body crushed her Brexit deal with the European Union.

U.K. lawmakers have rejected the Prime Minister’s terms for leaving the European Union. Options left include leaving the EU without a deal or a second referendum. Image: Parliament TV

It’s easy to lose sight of how bizarre this is. By rights she should have resigned. Obviously she no longer enjoys the confidence of her own party, let alone all of Parliament.

Yet even the 118 Conservatives who opposed her EU deal supported her as PM, as did the 10 members of the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party who prop up her government but also opposed her on Brexit. These folks enjoy griping from the sidelines about Brexit policy, but no one else wants to catch the spears that go with being in charge of the process.

The opposition Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is no better. Mr. Corbyn triggered Wednesday’s vote as a gambit to force a new national election that he hopes to win. His real priority is a socialist agenda for reshaping Britain’s domestic economy. Privately he seems to support Brexit. Publicly his views are a muddle. That doomed his confidence motion, as moderates recoil from his economic agenda and no one trusts him to be an honest broker.

The best chance for Brexit success was for the Tories to embrace the will of the people in 2016 and sell the public on the reforms necessary to turn Britain into a magnet for investment and human capital. Even now a hard Brexit could succeed if some Tories showed any desire to lead public opinion like Margaret Thatcher rather than follow it. But no one has been willing to make that case, not even the most ardent Brexiteers. Thus everybody has defaulted to Mrs. May, who will now see what more she can get from the EU.

Perhaps the prospect of a hard Brexit on the March 29 deadline will cause Germany, France and Brussels to be more accommodating—less in Mrs. May’s interests than in their own. Huge trade and regulatory dislocations and a European recession would hurt everyone, not merely Britain, and it could lead to a Corbyn government that would delight Vladimir Putin.

Brexiteers probably lost their opportunity to oust Mrs. May when they failed in a Tory Party coup attempt last year. Now they have to wait another year. But Britain still needs a leader who can command a majority in Parliament. And Europe and the U.S. need a strong Britain, in or out of the European Union.



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