Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
May Faces Leadership Challenge
As if the Brexit mess were not bad enough, the Conservative Party back-benchers have decided to start a leadership fight. The Tories are having their annual Christmas party later today, followed by a secret ballot on the continued leadership of Theresa May. If she loses, she will be expected to resign as Prime Minister. If she wins, there can be no leadership challenge again for a year, but she will still face the impossible task of getting her Brexit deal with the EU passed in the House of Commons.
The arithmetic is simple enough to understand, but the political calculations make it hard to forecast. There are 315 Tory MPs, and that means a majority is 158. That is the number of votes it will take to oust or confirm Ms. May as party leader. In order to trigger the leadership challenge, a minimum of 15% of Conservative MPs needed to send letters to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee (the Tory Party caucus) asking for such a ballot. That means 48 MPs had to come out against Ms. May. One may presume that every one of those is a vote against her later today, and it must be remembered that 48 is the floor. There may have been 52, 60 or 123 such letters after she withdrew the EU deal from the vote it faced in the House.
In short, if there are 110 votes, at most, in addition to the signatories, she is finished. So who would vote against her? Clearly, the hard-core Brexiteers are in that camp, and the questions are just how many of them are there and how many already signed letters? Are there ambitious MPs who do not mind her deal but who want to shake up the leadership so as to rise in the government? Probably, but no one knows how many. What of the Conservatives who want to remain in the EU? There are some, and will they back Ms. May or turn on her in the hopes that the political chaos that follows with derail Brexit completely? If the choice is between Remain and a no-deal Brexit, will a new leader choose remain?
Moving past the arithmetic, if she wins, the situation is no better than it was before. Those who vote against her will vote against her deal with the EU. Based on the letters, one presumes a minimum of 48 Tory votes against the government. That is more than enough to unite with the opposition parties to defeat the government on the Brexit deal. If that were to happen, there would almost certainly be a general election. No one knows who would win that, but the Conservatives would have to fight that election with Theresa May as their leader unless she were to voluntarily stand aside.
If she loses the leadership challenge, she must resign as party leader and there will be intense pressure on her to serve as PM only until a new leader can be selected. That process takes up to six weeks. It could take just a few days. Either way, those are days Britain does not have with Brexit Day on March 29, 2019. A new Tory PM will have to start with the deal as it is and go back to Europe to beg for changes. European President Juncker has already said there will be no renegotiation, but there could be some clarification. That is hardly reassuring.
The entire referendum and Brexit was always about the Conservative Party and its fear that the UK Independence Party would split the right. So, the referendum was to prove to the euro-haters that there was a pro-European majority in the county and bury the issue for a decade or so. Instead, it has the UK on the edge of leaving, and the Tories remain split. The UKIP is in decline because it lost its raison d'etre once the referendum passed, but if the Tories stay the course on Ms. May's deal, there are some MPs of the hard-Brexit ilk who may resign the Tory whip to reinvigorate UKIP.
There is one slim reed of hope. Young people in Britain are much more internationalist than their elders. This journal believes that, if Britain does leave the EU in 2019, it will apply for re-admission before 2040. Europe is too big and too important for Britain to ignore. The lessons Brexit will teach are going to be painful, but in the long run, they will convince the British people that the referendum delivered a bad result and that going back into Europe will become an inevitability.
© Copyright 2018 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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