Mrs. May had offered herself as a pair of “safe hands,” the epitome of old-fashioned conservatism. But she was unable to lead her colleagues to compromise.
LONDON — It was almost a relief, on Wednesday, to see Theresa May start yelling.
The British prime minister’s voice was hoarse and her face was pale, and who could blame her? That morning, a right-wing faction in her own party had triggered a no-confidence vote that would take place in the evening, so Mrs. May was possibly hours away from the end of her premiership. Her two years of negotiations on exiting the European Union were a hair’s breadth from ending in a meltdown.
At the weekly Question Time in Parliament, she leaned over the podium toward opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and spat out her disdain for him. She was seething.
“All he wants to do is create chaos in our economy, division in our society and damage to our economy,” she said, hollering to be heard over the cheers from her backbenchers. And Mr. Corbyn raged right back, accusing Mrs. May of leading her fractured country into a deepening, increasingly risky political crisis.
“Many people in this country find planning ahead impossible,” he yelled, “because all they see is chaos at the heart of this government!”
For many months, Mrs. May had maintained a robotic calm about the unraveling of her Brexit negotiation, pretending not to see that it was speeding toward a brick wall.
That pretense came to an end this week, when she abruptly canceled a Parliamentary vote on her European Union withdrawal agreement rather than suffer a humiliating defeat. Now, not only was she facing a no-confidence vote, but enemies in her own party were so confident that they had set up a headquarters they called “The Kill Zone.
