In her defense, she had plenty of help.
With yet another rejection of her Brexit deal looming, along with an imminent drubbing for her Conservatives in elections to the European Parliament, no one much disagreed with Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May when she stepped outside the black door of 10 Downing Street on Friday and said that it was “in the best interests” of the country for a new prime minister to take over.
She moved to that address in July 2016 with but one task, to clean up a mess not of her making. Her predecessor, David Cameron, had quit after calling a referendum on whether to exit the European Union, leaving it to Mrs. May to find a way of getting a brutally divided nation out of an extraordinarily tangled relationship. She failed, and on Friday she paid the price.
Mrs. May, a vicar’s daughter and lifelong Conservative stalwart, is exiting with all the dignity and reserve she has maintained throughout the tortuous process. But there was no denying the scope of her failure: The deal she had painstakingly negotiated with the European Union was overwhelmingly rejected by the British Parliament, again and again, and in the end she left the country more divided over Brexit than ever. The obligatory tributes poured in, recognizing that Mrs. May deserved at the least to be credited with extraordinary stoicism through all the setbacks, backstabbing and name-calling. But politics has little time for sympathy, and attention quickly turned to what next.
